Nostalgia as Religious Homesickness
For over 25 years I’ve kept a set of my grandfather’s books mostly as mementos. But last year I took one off the shelf and started reading when the trapped air in the long unused book hammered me. It smelled exactly like—no, it was thirty-year-old trapped air from-- my papaw’s distinctive study. The aromatic drug made me instantly high. I turned the page. I leaned over and inhaled. Deeply.
O, the transport! Suddenly it was 1975, and I was in my grandparents’ house filled with Charles Lamb’s “old familiar faces.” Here was endless possibility—when nothing but life unfolded before me. For just a few precious seconds I regained the intensity of my childhood joy. I dreaded rather than craved bedtime. Movement became effortless, color vibrant and thought unsullied by whatever adults must mean by stress.
Yet, the nostalgic high evaporated even before the scent of the old book dissipated. I came crashing into an intensified grief over the departed glory of that childhood world. “O death in life—the days that are no more.”
Such waves of feeling—flashbacks of childhood consciousness-- strike me like the news of a chronically sick loved-one passing away. It’s not unexpected but neither is it an experience for which I’m quite prepared. Bouts of joyous grief often arrest me, as Lamb says, when “I pace round the haunts of my childhood.”
Walking down the corridors of my old high school I find myself longing to return to a home which no longer exists. I thirst for a reunion this world can’t offer. My friends, whose memory haunts such halls, are all middle-aged or dead, now. Yet, class reunions are missing something far more than my deceased classmates. At such reunions I cannot escape the sad knowledge that friendships are never the same once we leave childhood.
Most people refuse to reflect seriously about what this nostalgic ache means. The experience I’m describing is something more than an impossible fantasy about turning back the clock. I’m speaking, rather, of deep places of the soul resurfacing the way it sometimes happens for traumatized people in therapy. In the weeks after the loss of a loved one, we may worry that our memories of them will fade. Fading powers of recollection seem a terrible dishonor to the one lost. But then we encounter a photograph or a familiar place. At that moment our powers of recall return; and we are emboldened to believe we can hold together a single story about our lives.
Mark Twain spoke about reconnecting to buried parts of his self when wrote his old friend Will Bowen:
“The fountains of my great deep are broken up and I’ve rained reminiscences for four and twenty hours. The old life has swept before me like a panorama; the old days have trooped by in their old glory; again the old faces have looked out of the mists of the past; old footsteps have sounded in my listening ears, old hands have clasped mine, old voices greeted me and the songs I loved ages and ages ago have come wailing down the centuries. Heavens, what eternities have swung their hoary cycles about us since those days were new.”
I think Twain is here deliberately echoing Lamb and many of the romantic poets. His reminiscence surges up from the temple fountains of a great deep within him. It’s not that he merely pines for the past as if his boyhood was devoid of civil strife, slavery, and mayhem. The Missouri of his youth was full of incomprehensible personal tragedy, and when he did go back to Hannibal he did not find himself at home there. No, the impulse to nostalgia is so powerful precisely because our retrospective experience of childhood is evoking far more than a fantasy about the good ol' days. Objectively speaking those days were not all that great.
The religious quality of Twain’s experience is evident. He says the subterranean deep of his subconscious is connected to the great cosmic deep which the ancient temples restrained. The life-giving fountains of such temples are connected to the buried parts of the self. Eternity swings back over and over again—as it has throughout the ages—and Twain glimpses life with the newness of his childhood. Memories go “trooping by in their old glory.” The intensity of the experience makes nostalgia a compulsive habit for older people, and it almost certainly was a factor in Twain’s perceptive genius.
Twain’s letter is constructing a small-town American version of the English poet William Wordsworth’s pastoral ode. Wordsworth is the quintessential writer about our lost childhood. “There was a time when…every common sight…did seem appareled in celestial light.” Wordsworth was convinced that this sense of lost vibrancy is quite universal, and his poetry was in part about awakening people to the true nature of their grief.
One of my earliest experiences of this retrospective sense of loss came quite early. It was, unsurprisingly, wrapped in the trappings of 20th-century consumerism. In 1966, Noma, the largest Christmas tree light company in the world, filed for bankruptcy as the United States Christmas light industry struggled with foreign competition and the introduction of the much smaller, foreign-made string-lights.
In the midst of the shakeup, companies changed the shape of the larger decorative lightbulbs. The new replacement bulbs came to a sharper point, emulating the shape of a candle flame. This was a nostalgic sop to the elderly, who could still remember a time when tree lights were actually candles.
Being but a child, I received this change as a heresy. Each year more of the older, classically convex bulbs burned out and were replaced with these fake flames. The magic moments stored in memories of my first Christmases seemed to burn out with the convex bulbs. One older-style lightbulb unaccountably continued to burn atop of the family tree for a decade. It symbolized a memory which had become a grievous religious longing.
Thirty years later, when my own son reached the age of six, he lamented with a childlike eloquence that would have impressed Wordsworth:
“Daddy, this Christmas tree is not giving me any warmth.”
This, in turn, reminded me of Israel’s experience when they returned home from seventy years of slavery. They began rebuilding the Temple, but those who had seen the previous Temple as young children were grief-stricken. It was just not the same. The mysterious glory which filled Solomon’s Temple did not re-fill the new one. The glory had departed. They were back in Jerusalem, but somehow it didn’t seem like home.
Nostalgia, of course, is very much this kind of homesickness. The Hebrew writer, after all, speaks of Abraham looking for a heavenly city-the eternal, ever-New Jerusalem-- which is built on more real and lasting foundations. Unable to wring a departed joy out of his present arrangements, Abraham’s heart ached for a different city-- another country—which, I would argue, we all sensed as children. Yet, for the Hebrew writer, this is not an impossible yearning to return to Eden; it is a realized and realizable yearning for the eschatological return of the tree of life.
The lonely deprivation of our “adult” experience comes into sharp focus when something places it in close juxtaposition with the intensity of our lost childhood glories. The nostalgic longing for their restoration has the potential to launch us on an Abrahamic quest.
That is if we allow ourselves to even notice our loss. The producers of those infomercials advertising musical collections of the oldies seem committed to reminding us of this grief. They want to monetize our longing. My generation’s music, itself, bears witness to what I’m speaking about. Bruce Springsteen sings of “glory days.” For Brian Adams it is not just about the “Summer of 69;” it’s that somehow that summer seemed to “last forever.” John Mellencamp in his “little ditty 'bout Jack and Diane” feels our loss: “O yea life goes on, long after the thrill of livin’ is gone.” We are homesick with Abraham, searching with my son for a place of lost warmth, where the days are glorious, Twain’s voices cross the centuries, the summers last forever, and the thrill of living is restored.
How we respond (once we actually acknowledge that the Mellencamp’s “thrill” has vanished) will likely determine the shape of our spiritual life. C.S Lewis observed that it’s possible to laugh off our nostalgic longing as if were a childish delusion better left repressed. Average people still live amidst the ruins of modernity where sappy childhood fairy tales are to be outgrown. Wordsworth’s ode—Twains celebrations of life-giving fountains--these are just naive tales. Deconstruction, parody, satire, and farce become the genres of “adult,” late-night television.
In fact, this seems to have been the course Twain eventually took. Blaming his own greed and irresponsibility for his child’s death, increasingly Twain’s writing turns its back on the “fountains of the great deep.” His writing becomes dark-- even nihilistic. He could not reconcile his own deepest lively intuitions with the senseless suffering in the world, and he thus came to doubt his earlier visionary experience.
On the Trustworthiness of Nostalgic Longing
That’s why it’s of particular importance for me to note that Wordsworth’s most soaring poetry stems from precisely Twain’s kind of loss. It is through in a flashback of Wordsworth’s own lost child, that he is “surprised by Joy.” In his Ode, Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood he speaks of our shadowy childhood recollections not as a retrospective delusion, but “the fountain of light of all our day.” For Wordsworth, these nostalgic recollections are not childish evasions but “a master light of all our seeing.” They inspire “obstinate questionings which move around in worlds not recognized,” and, thus, they are “high instincts before which our mortal Nature did tremble like a guilty thing despised.”
In the heading of this Ode, Wordsworth insists that “The child is, in fact, the Father of the Man/ and I could wish my days be/ Bound each to each by natural piety.” Here is a bereaved father writing in the firm conviction that the early intimations of childhood give birth to all truly adult, creative perceptiveness—a perceptiveness that goes beyond death.
How does Wordsworth come to this conviction? My favorite lines of the poem (181-2) involve Wordsworth’s finding strength “in the primal sympathy which having been must ever be…” Wordsworth knows that his early experiences of life were real. His relation with his daughter was real and cannot be forgotten. This memory does not merely live as a retrospective and imaginative distortion. Rather his imagination is formed by the external world in which imagination is already eternally present. Wordsworth learns to trust his recollections of childhood glory, and that “having been,” such glory must “ever be.”
I think I’ve experienced something of this kind of having-been- therefore-must-always-be conviction whereby we learn to trust our memories of lost glory. In May of 2012, I took my wife back to the eighteenth century Charleston Kitchen house where we honeymooned in 1994. I walked in and ascended the tiny, tight staircase, which is more like a ladder than a set of stairs, and the distinctive smell of the house jogged my memory; it opened for me something like Twain’s floodgates. Suddenly 18 years of intervening marriage were as nothing, and my wife and I were newlyweds again. I discovered that the experience of being a newlywed did not just live in my imagination, buried in the minutia of 6,500 different days since our honeymoon. My memory was real—something to be trusted-- as real as the old house I was smelling and touching once again. Feeling again the space associated with my honeymoon rekindled the exact experience I remembered. The way I remembered that newlywed feeling, in other words, was not a mistake.
I’m convinced that most of us may experience something like this kind of flashback in places we’ve actually never been before. I think that this is how most choose the churches we attend or the homes we purchase. Certain places, though we have never been there, for a variety of mysterious reasons, may immediately remind us of home. Charles Lamb’s old familiar voices hearken to us from the past, and we recognize home in the utterly new. The atmosphere is somehow profoundly familiar—it strikes us like an episode of déjà vu.
At present, I will not contend with those who reject out of hand that déjà vu is in any sense actually a form of precognition. Momentarily I will pretend deference to them. Let’s just assume that two-thirds of us just get our neurological wires crossed, and the powerful sensation of having already lived through presently transpiring events is just a widespread mental malfunction. In any case, the phenomenon as we generally experience it stands as a good metaphor for the kind of perception about which Wordsworth is pointing us. Déjà vu focuses our attention on the events which seem to hearken to us from the past. We are drawn to them with an inescapable sense of their familiarity and mysterious importance.
It is from this vantage point that we may follow Samuel Coleridge and dare to extend Wordsworth’s introspective insight as a way of understanding the nature of Christian spiritual perceptiveness.
Nostalgic Longing and Christian Revelation
Our capacity for depth or spiritual perception or, as Wordsworth would have it, perceiving the eternal “interfused” in the world, is what constitutive of what Christians may call spiritual perception. I here suggest that Wordsworth’s faculty is related to the phenomenon to which Jesus attests: namely that his sheep hear his voice. At issue is the capacity of followers of Jesus to recognize a kind of mysterious familiarity in the Christian accounting of the world.
The resurrection appearances are repeatedly about rediscovering such powers of spiritual recognition. In Luke, the resurrected Jesus is discerned by Cleopas and his buddy as the risen Christ breaks bread at a hospitable table. Fundamentally the recognition depends on the remembrance of meals past—the deep kind of feeling inaugurated in Jesus’ previous table prayers is somehow so identical to their present heart-warming the experience of this first Sunday Eucharist opens the spiritual eyes of the participants so that they recognize the present host/guest with that of the previously known Jesus.
The text is completely silent as to why the physical countenance of Jesus in this appearance is by normal sense-perception unrecognizable. If a director were to stage a reenactment of the conversation on the road to Emmaus he might obscure Jesus’ face with a hood or cloak. Nothing too much should be made of why the risen Jesus is not physically recognized except that the text is emphasizing that there are powers of recognition that go beyond mere personal physical acquaintance. There was something powerfully familiar about Jesus for which my six-year-old child’s early “warm” Christmas experiences have already prepared him to recognize. My son understood at age 6 the internal burning which the Resurrected Lord rekindled in Cleopas and his buddy on the road down from Jerusalem. It was the fact of that recognizable burning which reassured the disciples that their recognition of Jesus was correct. “Were not our hearts burning within us while he talked with us on the road and opened the Scriptures to us?"
The point is, perhaps, made even more poignantly in the latter chapters of John. The disciples have gone back home after the death of Jesus. Once again Peter and John are fishing on the Sea of Galilee. A figure calls to them from the bank. I assume the distance is sufficient that neither eye nor ear can recognize the identity of the figure. So it is exclusively in the way the renewed catch of 153 fish echoes the experiential memory of previous glorious catches which enables the beloved disciple to instantly recognize Jesus.
It is like this for many Christians still. With Mary on the morning of resurrection, we come to the garden alone and recognize the voice of the Lord when he pronounces our name even when he seems like as a simple gardener. With Mary, we just know how the Lord pronounces our name.
Again, by this John does not mean to suggest that the resurrected Jesus is recognizable because the vocal wavelength is exactly the same as that of Christ’s life as a Nazarene. Christian theology will surely insist that these are the same, though transformed, vocal cords. The point the text emphasizes, however, is that Mary does not recognize Jesus when he asks her the profoundly existential question "why are you crying? Who is it you are looking for?" Perhaps we imagine a crack in his voice. Regardless, she pays scant attention until Jesus calls her by name. Then, it is the deep feeling which arises within her that causes her to turn toward Jesus. She knows when she is being personally addressed by the Divine. This deep feeling of the previous experience hearkens back from her recesses and enables her to perceive this as no ordinary gardener. Here is someone more akin to the Second Adam and Great High Priest of the heavenly temple garden. It is then, with her own name re-sounding on the Divine tongue, that all the moments in which she was personally addressed with such heart-warming Love return and she is able to recognize the previous addresses in this one. Thus, it is then with a similar catharsis the keeps echoing through the centuries that we, too, hail him “dear Teacher.”
The most stunning instance of the spiritual perceptiveness I’m highlighting is that displayed by the beloved Disciple—whom most of my life I’ve equated with John. “Finally the other disciple, who had reached the tomb first, also went inside. He saw and believed. (They still did not understand from Scripture that Jesus had to rise from the dead.)” Here, the belief of the Beloved Disciple is possible even before the risen Jesus appears at all. John is careful to tell us that the belief in resurrection and Jesus triumph does not stem from any theological expectation. It does not arise because there is a scriptural prediction. No, here is the presence of deep wonder and joy. Behold the Beloved Disciple. This is not the despondency of Cleopas and his companion on the road to Emmaus. Here is not the confusion and distress of Mary who assumes somebody has robbed the grave. Here is one who can see grave clothes neatly folded up and just know that it wasn’t a hasty robbery. Once again Jesus is sidestepping the powers of this world. Once again Life is having the last word. Behold the powers of the Disciple’s recognition—behold the one who can hear the echoes of Jesus’ words— the resounding of primal intuitions—the assurance that spans the centuries.
There is a resurrection appearance, of course, that does not follow the pattern of spiritual perception I’ve been following. The risen Christ confronts Thomas with all the physical evidence asking him to touch the imprint of his cruciform wounds. It’s through common, every-day sense-perception that Thomas sees and believes. Such a story makes sure that we don’t think that faith is a matter of just wanting to believe something bad enough that we decide to make our own reality. The word of life which the John proclaims is forever concerning what the “eyes have seen and our hands have touched.” Jesus just hammers Thomas with physical evidence. Thomas believes and makes the good confession that has inspired Trinitarian theology ever since. However, while such faith is commendable, Jesus says even more blessed is the faith of those who can recognize Jesus with another capacity of discernment.
These souls are blessed with a spiritual perception which recognizes the Divine. For as many ways as the Divine comes to us, the Divine in Jesus Christ comes to us as a familiar echo from the past. There is a memory of him walking in Eden in each of us. He comes in the Spirit once again speaking order over the deep of the Sea. He comes multiplying loaves and raising the widow’s son with Elijah; he comes shining bright with Moses on the mountain, preaching Jeremiah’s sermon against injustice among the religious, suffering the Psalmist dereliction and outstripping even the sign of the prophet Jonah—unconstrained by the jaws of death. He comes as the echo we heard so loudly as children. He comes in the voice to whom all children flock, for from children God has ordained praise. They hail him in the Palm Sunday choir, and of such the Kingdom continues to be made.
Why do we believe? We trust the intuitions of childhood—the echoes of Eden and the longing for the Heavenly Jerusalem they leave behind. We already know the Life that has always nurtured us. We know the fire in the eyes of those who loved us. The Muslim converts because he sees in Jesus the one who has appeared to him in past dreams. The Hindu discovers in Jesus his life-long hope against all hope that the karmic spell may be broken and his untouchable life filled with warmth. In Jesus we rediscover that mysteriously familiar life-world of departed glory and begin to rediscover the thrill of living. The taste of the sacrament reawakens a holy desire for what seems lost but surely resurfaces in the mystery of holy friendships. We trust Holy Scripture because over and again it matches and illumines our primal experience, and we know that the sound of that voice hearkening to us from our earliest moments does not lie.
Every once in a while we catch a glimpse of what the seers of old were blinded by. We open our grandfather’s book and we can no longer ignore the pungent scent of the heavenly. In those brief moments, Jesus calmly assures us that our earliest experiences of that true and eternal home were no lie. Oh, happy, blessed, joyous, transcendent, glowing Easter to those who hear that Living Word.
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