Lost and Found (Abram Van Engen)
My kids on a newly discovered hiking trail
In these days of home quarantine, a friend of mine posts a scavenger hunt on social media each morning. It is a simple list of ordinary wonders in our neighborhood. As families file out for a morning walk, we search for a daffodil, a fire hydrant, a bicycle, a purple hyacinth, a bridge, a school, a bug. In Chicago, I have heard, neighbors who hardly know one another now band together to hide items in their windows. Children scamper down the sidewalks and across the empty streets in search of ordinary, everyday objects.
These are just two examples of the way life has changed. But they cause me to consider what I am looking for and what I will find in the midst of this pandemic. I see fear, certainly. As my friend and colleague John Hendrix observed last week, I also watch unwelcome anxiety weave through our loving precautions. I see myself and my family stuck at home, jumbled on top of each other, tense, impatient, unkind. Yet as life adjusts to this new world, I also see new kindnesses, new patience, a willingness to endure one another and to lighten another’s day.
Just a few weeks ago, Richard Hendrick, a Capuchin Franciscan Brother in Ireland, penned a poem about this changed world: “They say that in Wuhan after so many years of noise / You can hear the birds again. / They say that after just a few weeks of quiet / The sky is no longer thick with fumes / But blue and grey and clear.” In Italy and Spain, neighbors sing through open windows to comfort the lonely. Mo Willems, the great children’s book author, has started live sessions in his studio to draw and doodle with cooped-up kids.
These are lovely and beautiful moments, but let us make no mistake: this is a change that none of us would choose. People are losing their jobs, their businesses, their lives. No bird’s song in Wuhan, however beautiful, is worth so many dead and so much lost.
But I don’t think it diminishes our tragedy to give thanks for that song or those skies. I can imagine a recovering patient hearing the singing of the birds and finding in it a kind of hope. I can imagine that the citizens of Hubei might hope to hang on to clear skies.
In my life, my kids and I now pray together each morning and “commute” to school with a walk around the neighborhood. We have found thirty short hikes in the region we’ve never taken, and one-by-one we are discovering new paths and woods and creeks on sunny days. We started reading The Hobbit together. We began learning Spanish, a little bit each day. I taught my children poker (and I lovingly took their chips). I talk to my mother every day now, just to see how she is faring.
All of this could have happened before, but it never did—in part, because it never had to. We have found ourselves all together at home alone in a place that is altogether new.
I don’t prefer this place. If I had a choice, I would return to a world with schools and offices, with open restaurants and museums, with travel and playdates and laughter-filled swings—a world without this sickness or these deaths. But the choice was never mine to make. So I am having to learn new ways to live, and some of what I am learning I do not want to lose.
These weeks and months, this year of undone darkness, will no doubt leave innumerable losses, some far worse than others. But I am trying to approach this time as a kind of scavenger hunt, a searching out of my city, my neighborhood, my friendships, my family, my heart. I have been asked to find ordinary wonders in an extraordinary time – a fresh song, an unknown hike, a great novel, a new language, a group of people reaching out from home to home, a time I will never have again to know my children and teach them what I can and show them, as best as I am able, that they are loved. I am searching for something more than what is lost—and some of what I find, I hope I’ll never again misplace.
The gains can feel so small, especially given the enormity of the cost. But they are a grace all the same, and I do not want to miss them.
In the midst of the Fall, in the banishment from the Garden, however one interprets that scene of God’s mighty curse, one thing remains a small and striking wonder: before he sends them out, he comes down beside Adam and Eve, and he crafts for them new clothes. This is a small grace, to be sure, but it is a great reminder that God never leaves the scene.
Abram Van Engen is a Carver Project Faculty Fellow and Associate Professor of English at Washington University in St. Louis.
Further Reading:
Tish Harrison Warren, Liturgy of the Ordinary: Sacred Practices in Everyday Life
Return to The Carver Connections main page.