A Gathering of Stories (Abram Van Engen)

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We are all making our way through a global pandemic these days, and the ways we are making can be quite different. The pieces gathered in this Carver Connections series have come from many voices and spoken to many different audiences. Some struggle with isolation and separation, some with fear, some with sickness and death, some with boredom and disconnection. Some are stressed beyond belief; others are relatively calm and at peace. Some have lost their livelihoods, and others are carrying forward with salaries unimpeded or even increased. But all share in common a world suddenly altered. 

Whatever your own story might be right now, it is good to attend to the stories of others. The more we can move from tale to tale, the more we can begin to understand the complexity of this virus—what it means, what it brings, what lies behind the numbers of the sick, the dead, the recovered, the infected and the uninfected. All of us are affected in some way. For those who feel more boredom than fear, it is good to remember those who wish they could have nothing more to fear than days of boredom. We aren’t called to dwell every moment of every day in the suffering of the most distressed, but it is good to remember at some moment each day that such suffering dwells somewhere. That is part of what it means for us to bear one another’s burdens. For many at this moment, sickness and death constitute all they know. And we might also remember that for millions around the world, that had been true long before this virus struck and will remain true long after it is contained. 

There’s a poem I love by Lisel Mueller, which speaks to the disconnect between one person’s grief and a seeming joy or complacency everywhere else. In “When I Am Asked,” Mueller speaks of her mother’s death and the birth of her poetry. It was a perfect spring day with a bright sun and blooming flowers. She sat in a beautiful garden, mourning her mother, and everything seemed to be rejoicing. What she saw, she noted, was the complete “indifference of nature.” And in the face of that indifference, she wrote, “I…placed my grief / in the mouth of language / the only thing that would grieve with me.”

This poem focuses on why one poet felt compelled to write, but it also speaks tellingly of the need to read. Language works only in the in between. It is constituted by the very act of relation. It moves from a speaker to a listener and from a writer to a reader, and these movements over time have made it what it is. Nature would not grieve with this poet, but a reader might. And readers do. One by one, as they encounter this poem, they meet in brief the story of one whose grief was compounded by her isolation in a world that seemed only to rejoice. 

One of the reasons I became an English professor is because I am fascinated by stories and language and the connections they enable. I am drawn to the fellowship of words. We are more than a compilation of atoms and cells and neurons and chemicals; we are a composition of memories and tales and stories told again and again, orienting ourselves to this world through their telling and recounting. When I was trying to figure out what to do with my life, I could imagine for myself nothing better than moving from story to story, beginning to know and to teach and to talk about the many paths that humans travel—this vast and various multitude of individuals each bearing the image of God with the world all before them. For me, the soul is best known by the simple fact of the stories we carry and tell. Whatever else literature is, it is a relation made on this basis, a call and a response, a sharing of experience made possible by the breaking open of a book. 

That, too, is what the Psalms are, and it is how I was taught to read the Psalms long ago by my pastor, Len Vander Zee, who explained in no uncertain terms that we too often read the Psalms looking only for ourselves. We ought to read them looking for others, he insisted. He was so emphatic on this point that I have remembered it years later, though I must have been a boy when he preached it.  

“Read the Psalms every day,” he said, “and read them one by one in order.” Such a practice, he explained, would mean that the words we came across would not necessarily match our mood or thoughts. Some Psalms are filled with rejoicing. Others are filled with mourning. Some speak of faithfulness and others of absence. Some cry out in distress and others cry out in praise. But all of them speak of human experience in relation to God. If we want to “rejoice with those who rejoice and weep with those who weep,” as Romans 12:15 tells us to do, we can begin by reading through the Psalms, a different one each day. For each Psalm will be a good expression of what another believer somewhere in the world is experiencing that day—someone for whom we can pray. 

It is the right time to gather stories and the right time to share our own. For as we move from tale to tale, we can begin to offer fellowship and bring companionship to the afflicted. By simply asking for another’s story, by offering an ear, we can do our own small part to ensure that no one travels this time alone.

Abram Van Engen is a Carver Project Faculty Fellow and Associate Professor of English at Washington University in St. Louis.

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