REMEMBERING

What do you remember of Covid? What comes to mind from those first few weeks? Those first spring months, stretching into summer? Then a full year, another, and another. What do you remember?

For me, it began with canceled talks. I was supposed to fly to Boston, then elsewhere. I had checked in for my flight when I received an email from my dean telling me I could not fly. Suddenly everything else canceled. Facing an empty calendar, my family got in the car and drove to a secluded place in the Gulf Shores that our friends had rented. We walked the beach in warm weather as the world shut down. I thought, if everyone stays put a few days, this will all be over soon.

And then those weeks that followed: turning to Zoom, trying to figure out how to teach online. Scrambling for toilet paper. Washing groceries. Not knowing what was safe, what was not. I remember our family began “commuting” to school by walking around the neighborhood before coming back to the house. I remember Maundy Thursday. I remember Easter in our home.

“Remembering is a holy act,” Hendrix says later in this collection.

It has always been so. The Old Testament is nothing short of a repeated call to remember. In the book of Deuteronomy, the Israelites are told to “remember” fifteen times. “Remember the whole way that the Lord your God has led you these forty years in the wilderness” (Deut. 8:2). “Remember and do not forget” (Deut. 9:7). “Remember your servants, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob” (Deut. 9:27). Exodus creates a story that must be told, retold, and constantly remembered. “Remember the days of old; consider the generations long past. Ask your father and he will tell you, your elders, and they will explain to you” (Deut. 32:7).

Christians carry that remembrance into the life of Jesus, the acts of Christ. On the altar of my childhood church, a single line proclaimed: “Do this in remembrance of me.”

Each sacrament is more than memorial, of course. But it is never less. The dip of water, the breaking of bread—these acts call to mind the past and make it present again. The story we have long inhabited comes to be remembered through the remaking of it, our renewed partaking in it. It is why we tell the stories again and again, why teach them to our children.

In my last church, at each baptism, the minister prayed an old Huguenot prayer that made this remembering part of the ceremony and the life we are called to live:

Little one,

For you God made the world;

for you, He sent His Son as a baby born in Bethlehem;

for you, this child grew up and lived a perfect life;

for you, He suffered bitterly in the Garden of Gethsemane;

for you, He was crucified on a Roman cross, and died;

for you, He was raised from the dead to life.

For you, He ascended to heaven and was seated at the right hand of God the Father, where He lives now to pray for you.

Little one, you can’t know these things now.

But we, your church, promise to keep telling you this great story until you make it your own.

We keep telling the story because we live in the world it has made.

The story of Covid deserves remembering, too. It still shapes our world. Sad and tragic as it was, divisive as it became, its collective memory shapes the present in ways we may not be able to fully trace or imagine—those lockdowns, those closed parks, the endless zoom sessions, close quarters, lost contacts. Lost loved ones.

Grief has a way of sanctifying and making holy. Sorrow does not allow us to take the good for granted, and the remembrance of what we have lost reveals the depths of our love. In the sharing of our stories, we continue to be shaped by the shared story of what we all lived through.

What follows in this collection are a series of reflections and remembrances from our Carver community. It was Covid that began the entire series of Carver Connections and reflections. We wanted some way to reach out at a time when we all had to isolate. So in that first week of shutdown, we began to write, posting five times a week at first. From that full collection, still available online, we have pulled a few to print—asking each writer to reflect on what they wrote five years ago. Asking each writer to remember. 

Yet for all the memories we share, for all our reflections here, we remember this most of all: the blessing of God in the story of scripture is that his memory holds our own. Across the Bible, the word “remember” occurs over 250 times. Most of the time, it concerns the activity of God. When the Israelites groaned in Egypt, God heard their cry, and according to Exodus 2:24, “God remembered His covenant with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.” God remembered. God delivered.

The same is true of the New Testament, and no more clearly than in Maundy Thursday itself. This memorial, this remembering and this renewing through the act of participation, is nothing less than the remembrance of God remembering us—God acting on our behalf.  

And so we remember. This collection of memories and responses from Covid aims to remind us that God never goes away. God acts. God delivers. Because God’s memory never fades.

Abram Van Engen is the Stanley Elkin Professor in the Humanities and Chair of English at Washington University in St. Louis and Executive Director of The Carver Project.