Why We Look Back

In the weeks since becoming an engaged man, I’ve caught myself meditating a little too much on the past. I suppose the prospect of marriage has stoked my nostalgia.

The word nostalgia comes to English from Greek. According to The American Heritage Dictionary, the Greek root “nostos” means “a return home.” It goes on to define nostalgia as a “bittersweet longing for the past, or homesickness.”

Etyomologically speaking, nostalgia denotes displacement. A longing to go back home is an indication that you’re not currently there. Realizing that fact helps me understand why, every time I indulge in concentrated wistfulness for days gone by, I feel a slight sense of shame. Nostalgia can be an innocent appreciation of where one has come from, but I feel that in my case, it often functions as species of despair.

In some ways, death can be understood not merely as the cessation of biological function (we might refer to that as ‘clinical death’) but as the existential loss of relationships and identities. For example, many people, upon graduating high school, never recover the relational closeness they once shared with best friends. That’s a kind of death. The uniquely modern, Western rhythm of life that radically displaces human beings for the sake of education and careers often prevents us from appreciating this. But people are irrevocably relational and community-seeking, because they are made in the image of a relational God. That means that when relationships are forged and a sense of mutual identity is established, something inside each person is affected in a divine sense. We are behaving like God when we are authentically relational. When that identity is quenched, cut off or forgotten, the effect–even if we don’t feel it as such–is like death.

We are not exclusively relational to other individuals, either. We form mutual identities with groups, places, events, things and even feelings. That explains why at many funerals, for example, the casket is surrounded by pictures and memorabilia. Acknowledging death goes beyond acknowledging that a person is no longer medically alive; it entails a symbolic separation from a reality, the reality of the deceased and all they were and did.

We don’t normally call what happens at funerals “nostalgia.” The word has a cheaper connotation than that. Instead, we express gratitude that the pictures and memorabilia testify of not just a human body but of an existence, of an identity which melded with countless other people and places while the departed was alive. However, simply because we would not say it doesn’t mean it’s false. A funeral is indeed deeply nostalgic.

What if the reverse is also true? What if nostalgia is a form of funeral? This makes sense for two reasons. First, nostalgia often confers upon the past an exaggerated goodness, happiness or security. The good old days are rarely too good. In my own life, I have caught myself being nostalgic for times in which I was, in pretty much every sense, worse off than I am now. The reality of what was going in those days is not the point. I am nostalgic for the past itself, not for what actually happened.

The second reason I suspect nostalgia is a form of personal funeral is that it almost always provokes more grief than gratitude. Gratitude is a deeply important virtue; if ever we are tempted to doubt that, an encounter with an ungrateful person (perhaps ourselves!) will snap us back to reality. But I’ve found that nostalgia rarely produces a thankfulness for the gifts of the past. In fact, in my experience, suppressing thankfulness is often key to remaining in the nostalgic state of mind. Perhaps that’s because thankfulness–the genuine kind–is realistic. There’s nothing more grounded in truth than an awareness of the daily mercies that have been imparted to us. Nostalgia on the other hand is about escaping reality, conferring unreal qualities onto our ephemeral remembrances in order to relive something we never lived in the first place.

Talking nostalgia down in a blog post is easy. Overcoming it at midnight, when the very bed you lie on is a piece of your past that will soon be coming to a permanent close, is more difficult. When the emotions wash over me, I’m no longer thinking rationally about my tendency to exaggerate the goodness of the past. Nor am I consciously steering my soul towards thankfulness to God and to the people who have loved and cared for me. No, I am merely afraid. Afraid of losing that which I know to embrace that which is unsure. Afraid that the abundance of yesterday is over and the famine could start at any moment. Afraid that leaving and cleaving is a skydive with an untested parachute.

Nostalgia so often becomes an act of despair, a cry of helpless protest against Death and his most effective weapon, Time. But right then, right when I am most tempted to despair, I think of Paul’s words in 1 Thessalonians 4:

 Brothers and sisters, we do not want you to be uninformed about those who sleep in death, so that you do not grieve like the rest of mankind, who have no hope. For we believe that Jesus died and rose again, and so we believe that God will bring with Jesus those who have fallen asleep in him.

“So that you do not grieve” like those with “no hope,” remember: Jesus died and rose again. A funeral ends one of two ways: If the body is laid to rest and buried, or if it springs alive in its casket. Paul says that hope–oh, that beautiful, beautiful word!–is founded in the fact that Jesus died and now lives. Death is defeated. Its work is undone. That means its weapon, Time, has been blunted. The worst that death can do is unite us to the one who defeated it.

This is true hope because it is hope not just for deceased loved ones, but for all of creation. If death is defeated, that applies to everything, not just our biological existences. Our relationships, identities–everything of which we grieve the loss when we are nostalgic–it will all be restored as death is swallowed up in victory.

I need not weep for the past, or fear the future. They are both secure. Because of Christ and him crucified and resurrected, I can lose nothing. To look back is to look forward.