Held Together by the Powerful Force of a Story

Fifteen years ago, we took a cross-country road trip with four kids, a minivan, and a big tent. About a third of the way across the country, weary of feuding brothers in close quarters, we were ready to throw in the towel and come home. One thought sent us westward with renewed resolve: What story did we want to be able to tell about this trip when it was all over?

Did we want to remember the trip as an abandoned dream? As it happened, we actually made it! We put up with each other, we saw a lot of beauty together, and now, our road trip becomes a better memory every year.

I’m thankful that it’s a story of persevering together in hope rather than giving up and embracing failure. And so the question emerged, and it’s still with me: What story do you want to be able to tell?

Of course, at that time, I had not formulated any guiding questions. I was fully immersed in the crisis of the moment and wondering how to keep up with the laundry!

Because we have the memory of that shared story, I’m asking myself more searching questions: What story do I want my kids and grandkids to be able to tell about our marriage? When their marriages hit a rough spot someday, I want them to remember that we persevered through financial pressures, health challenges, family crises, and the sandpaper of everyday life. I want them to remember that we loved one another well, that we have been a united front and a refuge for them.

When the rigors of routine become odious, and you’re tempted to quit, ask yourself this question: What story do I want to be able to tell? What story do I want to have living in the held memory of my family?

When the rigors of routine become odious, and you’re tempted to quit, ask yourself this question: What story do I want to be able to tell? What story do I want to have living in the held memory of my family?

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The Force of a Story

Andy comes to realize the force of the story of his grandfather’s loss through his father Wheeler’s work in legal advocacy for small farmers. Over time, it became clear that the shared story had shaped “the kinds of a man that Wheeler could not be, a certain kind that he had to become, and certain things he had to do.” The Catlett family was deeply embedded in the Port William community, and so Marce’s story becomes the property of that community.

Readers accustomed to Berry’s writing won’t be surprised when they come to the end of the book with a greater understanding of both the hard work of raising a crop and the vagaries of the economy that make farming such a perilous way of life. Marce’s son Wheeler clearly recalled the memory of “a time when his people had not enough of anything except fear.”

Handed-down stories carry passion along with them, impacting the memories and the motives of future generations and binding them together. In a sense, all of us belong to a story, whether or not we are aware of it. Wendell Berry’s poetic prose wraps itself around the beauty and also the grief of commonly held memory:

The story and the love borne in it, passing down, has held them together like a living root of the same tree, and like a tuned string, across a hundred and eighteen years and five generations.”

As Wendell Berry is now in his nineties, this may very well be my last foray into the world of Port William, and that’s a sobering thought. There’s a touch of melancholy in the narrative that suggests an ending, and yet even in this, wisdom from the Membership gives me hope:

As he has come to know, Andy’s grief for the things that are lost affirms his love for them, as even the loss of them affirms the bounty by which they once existed, for in this world grief goes hand in hand with gratitude.”

And so, glimpsing the end of a story I have loved, I’m giving thanks.

Holding You in the Light,

In Marce Catlett: The Force of a Story, Wendell Berry’s poetic prose wraps itself around the beauty and also the grief of commonly held memory. @CounterpointLLC

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A New YouVersion Devotional!

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