Made for Fellowship (Abram Van Engen)
A word cloud image generated from the collective text of these Carver Conversations (via www.wordclouds.com)
For the past ten weeks, The Carver Project has published a gathering of stories, a series of reflections from a wide variety of contributors, each trying to think through what this global pandemic means and how we, as Christians, should respond. Today we draw that series to a close, and next week we begin a different way to connect (look for more details next week). In this last, longer post, I wanted to observe some of what we have learned together and note some of the themes that have seemed to prevail:
We are living in a world of loss. What has been is no more, and what we expected for our lives is not coming to pass. Each, in our own way, is grieving something gone, from small perks and pleasures to the canceling of meaningful events to the closure of businesses to the irreplaceable loss of persons we have loved. This is a diminished world, a season of stripping away.
The responses to such losses can take any number of forms. But what seems clear from the reflections in this series is that many of us had been living “as if.” We lived as if we were secure, as if we were the masters of our days. The first thing lost to COVID-19 was a sense of control.
There’s an image I have always loved for this “as if” way of living. In one of her better-known poems, the seventeenth-century Puritan poet Anne Bradstreet sketches a proud sailor operating as though all is stable beneath his feet:
The Mariner that on smooth waves doth glide
Sings merrily and steers his bark with ease,
As if he had command of wind and tide,
And now becomes great Master of the seas;
But suddenly a storm spoils all the sport
And makes him long for a more quiet port,
Which ‘gainst all adverse winds may serve for fort.
The sudden storm, for all of us, has certainly come. And what no one can now ignore is what so many in this world have long known: we are not the master of the seas. “I had an academic understanding of the unpredictability of the natural world,” Doug Wiens writes in his reflection, but “COVID has helped me realize that the feelings of predictability and stability are illusions not shared by most people throughout history, or even most individuals in the world today.” Anthony Meyers and Seth Reid each echo his sentiments. The instability and unpredictability of the world has come home, and in the process, it has called into question so much of what we took for granted. “Every day I am hit hard with the reality of our vulnerability,” George Stulac writes. Vulnerability seems “to be the central fact of our lives,” Heidi Kolk adds, “the hard truth we must confront at every turn.”
Yet the more we enter into our own weaknesses and limitations, the more we are also beginning to discover the many ways God’s grace appears. “Mourning what is lost also reminds me of what has been given,” Meredith Liu writes. In the midst of grieving all the experiences her senior year would no longer contain, she found herself coming to a remarkable and surprising feeling of gratitude. “It dawned on me then that God had never promised me a happy college career,” she writes. Quite unexpectedly, she found herself flooded with thankfulness—grateful for what Kelly Oeltjenbruns calls “unnecessary blessings.” Summarizing what so many have said, John Inazu writes, “My own life these days feels like a constant mixture of gratitude and lament.”
Losses can inspire an unexpected sense of gratitude, but they also strengthen a sense of longing – a heightened perception of all that our heart desires. “Our losses are bringing our longings closer to the surface,” George Stulac writes. The word “want” perfectly encapsulates this sense of loss and longings, for it means both to lack and to desire. It is almost impossible these days to be unaware of our “wants”—all that we no longer have and all that we long to have back. Hardship, as John Hendrix reflects, often “sharpens our sense of a joy still to come.”
In these ways, the pandemic has asked us to pay attention to what matters, to slow down, to practice patience, to stand and wait in ways that help us notice the smaller and often more important things. “We most easily recognize Christ’s presence,” Asher Gelzer-Govatos observes, “when we are stripped of those things which distract us and chew away at our time, when we imitate to some small degree Christ’s own emptiness on the cross.” As Eric Stiller writes, the pandemic “has moved us from being glutted to being emptied, and it raises the question of what we really want out of life.” What do we need? What do we desire? And who or what do we love? These are the big questions. They have always been present, but the stripping away for our regular lives can make our pursuit of answers all the more acute. Behind our masks, we are being brought face to face with ourselves.
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But not just ourselves. The absence of others is revealing just how much we rely on them. “The Christian life is one meant to be lived in community,” Andrea Butler writes. In fact, the Greek word for the church means, as Brent Roam reminds us, means “the assembled,” those who are gathered together. What does church mean when the church can no longer gather? What does a congregation entail when no one can congregate? God has always been with us and always will be. Yet as Jill Pasteris asks, “how do we feel and experience that presence when we are separated from most of what is around us?” Andrea Butler, Stephanie Snow, George Stulac, and others speak to the loneliness of isolation.
It is true that churches stand empty. Yet the Body of Christ has never been bound by brick or stone. Shelley Milligan, Nii Addy, and many contributors to this series reflect on the fact that community is not just physical. We are called to social distancing, not social isolation. Hebrews 10:25 tells us to continue meeting and “encouraging one another,” and Kelly Oeltenbruns reminds us that “encouraging one another is particularly vital amidst strange and scary times.” When we cannot meet, we can still connect.
In coming together under new conditions, an extraordinary creativity of inclusion has flowed from the closures of our churches—something that gives Elizabeth Coors a distinct hope for the church’s future. Because all of us now know in some measure the “pain of isolation and loss of traditional community,” we are beginning to imagine better ways to reach those who formerly could not come to church—those who knew isolation and separation long before social distancing became the norm.
In that way, a central aspect of who and what the church is—what defines the Body of Christ—goes on. Loving others never ceases. As Johanna Christophel observes, “Our faith calls us to hold tomorrow loosely while loving and doing good urgently anyway.” That call, that command to love others, lies at the center of fellowship both within the church and without. Quoting Dietrich Bonhoeffer, John Hendrix reminds us that “The church is the church only when it exists for others,” which means that our isolation and social distancing must flow from and lead into a love for others. As Katie Nix remarks, in the times and places where God seems most absent, the presence and power of God continues to flow through healing and hopeful relationships all around us.
Considering that call to love others in the midst of this pandemic, Shelley Milligan poses a central question that recurs through so many of these reflections: “What would it mean for us, each day, to approach all these interruptions as places where God challenges our control of our own lives and asks us, in dependence, to learn about ourselves and to love others well—to serve them in ways we might never have thought of before?”
We stand on both ends of this question, both the call to give and the act of receiving. Noting her own experience with deep vulnerability, Heidi Kolk puts into words what has become true for so many of us now: we are “learning to accept our weakness, and to receive others’ acts of love—and to see both as evidence of God’s grace.” We are learning or relearning how much we rely on others, how much we need each other. We are learning or relearning that God’s grace, as Sara Flores writes, so often comes in the form of community. We are finding, once again, that we are made for fellowship—and fellowship endures despite this virus.
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The fellowship that flows in and with and through others mirrors the fellowship that is God—the love that binds the Trinity and spills into all creation. Ultimately, as Allie Spors and Franciska Coleman write, we must lift our eyes to God, a God who has all things in His hands. Sharing her own incredible story, Liz Privat teaches us again that God meets us so often where we least expect it. Anxiety abounds, but Jesus tells us to trust, to place ourselves in the hands of God, and he exhibits his own non-anxious presence as a model.
Still, as so many in this series comment, trust is hard. How do we put ourselves in God’s hands?
We can place ourselves in God’s hands because God put Himself in ours. Mike Farley, in his Lenten reflection, reminds us of the central fact that God, in Jesus Christ, enters the darkness with us. The healing that God makes possible emerges in and through brokenness. Whatever else the cross signifies, it serves as the ultimate sign of unbroken fellowship. God so longed to dwell among us that he gave his only son to achieve the fact. He has brought us into fellowship by emptying himself. Trust dwells in the understanding that God dwells with us. It comes through the knowledge that God has come to us. It takes hope from a seemingly hopeless death on a cross and rises in the assurance that Jesus rose from the dead.
We are made for fellowship, each one of us. We crave it and cling to it. And that fellowship we have with God can never be lost. No one and nothing can shake it. For God abides with us still when all else has failed or fallen away—a love and a presence that will never depart, an answer to all our longings sharpened by all our loss.
Abram Van Engen is a Carver Project Faculty Fellow and Associate Professor of English at Washington University in St. Louis.
Final Thought:
For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord. (Romans 8:38-39)
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