Memory is such a beautiful thing! Without our memories, life would be a flat, tasteless pursuit of our most immediate needs, without reference to the times, places, and people that have inhabited the same little slice of time and space as we.
Dictionary.com defines nostalgia as, “a wistful desire to return in thought or in fact to a former time in one’s life, to one’s home or homeland, or to one’s family and friends; a sentimental yearning for the happiness of a former place or time,” (italics added). It comes from two Greek words, nostos, meaning “homecoming” and algia, “pain.” As part of the emotional landscape of our lives, it seems rather ambivalent to me. Nostalgia gives rise to the most exquisite, delectable, but at the same time painful feelings that we are capable of. These feelings are what can make nostalgia dangerous.
Memory is such a beautiful thing! Without our memories, life would be a flat, tasteless pursuit of our most immediate needs, without reference to the times, places, and people that have inhabited the same little slice of time and space as we. Our memories make present, though in a limited and somewhat distorted way, the events of our past, together with the emotions we once experienced. In particular, these emotions, cleaned up and polished as they are by the passage of time, give our memories the power that they have to affect the present and, thereby, our future as well. Thoughts of happy times, such as Christmases we have lived through, make a kind of demand upon us in the present. Looking backward, we make choices that we believe will bring those joys back to us now.
But our belief that this is so deceives us. Indeed, there is much we can recall with pleasure about past events, but this recollection is not always accurate, or what we remember may no longer be appropriate in the season of our lives we now are living. We may remember, for example, the happiness we knew in our childhood of a shining, snowbound Christmas, and we conclude with Bing Crosby that it is the snow that makes Christmas so “merry and bright.” Although this defies logic (and snow can really lose its charm when you have to drive a car in it), we might still feel a little disappointment when December 25 greets us in the form of a green lawn and buckets of rain. It is not the snow that made Christmas for us as a child, but everything that went along with it: family, closeness to one another, gifts, music, mystery, etc.
In living our faith, we may be drawn by nostalgia to experiences of God or of church such as we had when we were children. Such nostalgia certainly has its place, but it can also be a source of spiritual deception. God is always calling us to be with Him right now, in the present, moment by moment living a relationship with God that leads to our destiny, namely, eternal life. Nostalgia can stunt our spiritual growth by making us incapable of the transformation by which we put off the old self and put on the new self given us in baptism (Ephesians 4:22-24). Pining for the happiness we knew in former days can cut us off from the happiness that awaits us, but which we do not yet know. We remain children in a faith that calls us to greater and greater maturity (Ephesians 4:13).
We can learn to use nostalgia in ways that do serve our spiritual growth. Think of it: the happiness we knew earlier in our lives might be a steppingstone toward our future. The joys of Christmas past cannot be compared with the joys that await us when Christ himself comes to take each one of us by the hand and lead us personally into the Kingdom of God that is, in truth, our real homecoming and the joy we most long for.