Have Stories Will Travel 2

(Continued from last week)

Amidst the solemn hush was an unmistakable sadness, an aching loss. And as I turned from the chapel back towards the hospital building in ruins, that sadness began to morph into stories—as if my sympathetic compassion had opened a channel through the ages, as if time was no longer linear (or I finally felt the real truth of the linearity being merely human handles on this thing we call existence).

The stories came up out of the earth, out of the stone. I was there in the year of the dissolution, on the day the king’s men arrived on horseback. The infirmary was crowded with the aged and the sick, the monks busy with their task of administering what healing could be afforded and comforting those whose ailments were now in God’s hands. I could feel the sandals on my feet, the coarse, woolen robes swishing at my ankles.

And then the ache—it saturated the place, real, visceral. The choice was either to retire with a pension or be put to death. That was the point of no return of the dissolution of the monasteries—no more of the way things had been. I could feel each monk wrestling with the choice: give up this life of prayer and service? Deny your community the care the hospital provided? Turn away from your oath of dedication? Or die?

The threat of mortality was choking, the anguish as the aged were unwilling to take on the change, the young afraid of an unknown future. The air was thick, almost hot, and I reached out to the stone wall for stability, overwhelmed by the cacophony of stories demanding attention all at once until they were shouting at me, begging the political madness and betrayal and destruction to stop.

I had to move onto a different part of the grounds, my heart thumping away. Towards the river by a grassy lawn lay the barracks, all orderly in a row, like cells off a central hall. Here the walls were sometimes only six inches high and easily stepped over now. It was airier here, and the sun penetrated well.

A family was picnicking, throwing a Frisbee for their fluffy dog in golden browns who paid no attention to the foreign strangers about. Birds were singing in the woods along the river, and I was strangely alone in this part of the grounds. In fact, no one came up to talk to me all through the experience.

But here too were stories. As I stopped to gaze on the hearths of herringbone fireplaces, they came again, only different this time—trickling as I moved from room to room, not pushing or shoving for attention. The stories were of why the men had come to the monastery: younger sons with no hope for inheritance, the penitent from a violent earlier life, the pious who had no care for the everyday world of marriage and babies and wars, and the solitude seekers who savored the simple life of prayer, fasting, and service. They wanted to be known, wanted to be recognized as existing, wanted to be remembered.

And I cried, welling up from someplace deep down inside my heart those tears came, not in sobs, but in a soft, steady stream down my face. It wasn’t stories in books anymore, it wasn’t generalizations or statistics or stereotypes—it was real people. People who had dedicated their life’s works here, right where I was standing.

It reached out and grabbed me so deeply that now, over eight years later, I can still be standing in that spot, right now in my mind, even in a Wisconsin January. I can still smell the heady, June air, still know those stories. I wrote in my journal that night that it was good of the trip not to have lingered there any longer, or surely I would have been a sobbing mess slumped on a stone, unable to go on.

I had to have something to hold onto after that moment—a talisman of the awakening—and so in the inevitable gift shop at the exit, I found a pewter brooch of Celtic knotwork that called my name (though Tintern Abbey was hardly Celtic). “Have me, hold me, remember me” it seemed to beckon from its purple velvet case. We were running out of time. The bus was waiting. The rest of the group was waiting. They actually sent one of the members (I forget who) back into the grounds to find me. I had no idea of the time, still feeling dazed, trying to muster composure and dry my face. But I still have that brooch.

We boarded and from the tinted window just behind the driver, I watched the Abbey ruins presently fade away as we rounded the corner onto the next destination.

When someone still tells your story, in ancient times, it was considered part of the hero’s immortality. Make a mark on history and your praises shall be sung throughout the ages—and part of you shall never die. But what if you were part of the everyday fabric of a village, a countryside, a monastery? What of your story, your contribution to the whole? Admittedly, I’d always been chasing the “lived experience” of an era, ever since that 4th grade outing to the living history museum Old World Wisconsin.

But this, this was so unexpected, so real. And I never doubted for a moment then, or since, just how real that exchange had been.

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Have your own story that’s yearning to be told? Next Writer’s Circle Workshop is hosted at Farmstead Creamery on Thursday, February 9th from 3 to 5 pm. Bring paper and pen (or a laptop if you prefer), and we’ll see you down on the farm sometime!