The Phenomenon of Nostalgia and the Light of God

It was exactly 500 years ago this year that the New Testament freshly written in German by Martin Luther was released for public consumption.  This seminal work - in addition to making the Word of God available to the common man - was one of the original catalysts that brought about the transition from the Middle Ages into the modern world we know today. Up until that day no one really read the Bible and very few read much of anything at all.  It was a largely illiterate time, and this was mostly connected to the fact that until then books had to be copied by hand and were thus very expensive to make.  It’s hard for us to imagine a world like this but we can try.  Picture a place without TVs and cell phones, without video games or the internet.  A time without airplanes or cars, where traveling anywhere was either on foot or by horseback – something so arduous that many people rarely did it. 

Your job was in your town – likely assigned to you by the nature of your birth – and you did that job your whole life.  Your education, if you were rich enough to have one, was somewhere close enough for your parents to send you and you learned whatever your teachers taught you.  Your village’s Parish taught you about God.  Your faith was a simple and humble one, where life’s meaning was given by God and taught to you through the Church.  Your wife came from your village, and you likely had known her your whole life.  Children grew up and lived in the same place as their parents and their grandparents and their great grandparents and so on.

Life was largely static.  And there is a beauty to this.  Who hasn’t longed for a day where there were no such thing as smart phones, where people on the street actually talked to each other and where community wasn’t based on the ever-fragile desire of individuals to open themselves up to a group rather than to retreat into the isolation of their noise-cancelling headphones and screens?

The idealist in me sees the Middle Ages as a kind of Hobbit-like Shire.  Where the villager is given all that he really needs.  His days are filled with work – yes – but when he retires for the evening he comes home to his wife and kids.  And as he walks to his abode, he passes by people that he has known his whole life; he gives the respectful nod to the elder, trades barbs with a childhood friend and smiles at all the other souls who he will interact with in various ways for the rest of his life.  The landscapes, the people, the work, the seasons, the community celebration of holy days.  All such things become the rhythm to the song that he will hum his whole life.

Gratefulness is the mood of the age.  Sunny, humble, gratefulness.

~🌻~

Now I would be remiss if I didn’t state that my above characterization is really less of a take on the Middle Ages than it is an anti-tech laced lamentation of our current world.  Living in the time that we live in, when I read about people who live simple lives in the same places that their families have lived in for generations, I imagine happy, peaceful homes filled with laughing children and stories told by the fire.  And it may very well have been a real thing that people lived this way but though I described this time as if it was a paradise, it’s important to state that there were very real problems in these days.  Things like the unjust privilege of the nobility, the shallowness of faith, the corruption of the Church, early mortality rates, the Black Plague and so on would have done plenty to contribute to the familiar feelings of discontent and strife that we know so well today.

Apart from the Garden of Eden and the coming fullness of the Kingdom of Heaven there is no such thing as a time or a place without problems.  We may not like what smart phones and social media have done to our world, but we can be assured that even in past times - before everyone was looking down at their screens - that the isolating and inward-driving power of sin was working in the hearts of men.

Yet the temptation to look back longingly to a time with different challenges remains a strong one.  In fact, if my main complaint is about the effect of technology on society, it may not even be necessary to go back 500 years for my idealism to conjure up a vision of an unhindered and healthy society.  Heck, I’d take any time before iPhones and Twitter to be honest.  Would not the 1980s and 1990s be acceptable to most of us if we had to choose between them and our time today?

But nostalgia, whether it is for the simpler times of our childhoods or for days that preceded our own, seems to fixate on the positive things of the past while skimming over the negative, more harrowing details.  And the Reagan/Clinton years just like the Middle Ages were surely fit with problems of their own.

~ 🌾 ~

But that is in some sense what makes the phenomenon of nostalgia so interesting, is it not?  What is it inside of us that is able to look through the editing lens of the past and only see the beauty of something that was?  Is there some kind of primordial, subconscious impulse within the human heart that knows that there was something glorious in the past?  Something long forgotten yet stamped upon our soul as if being written into our very DNA?

Scripture answers this with a shocking “Yes”.  This is found in John 1:9 where Jesus is described as “The Light” that “enlightens every man coming into the world”.  This means that every person at some point around his/her conception touches the Light, Love, Warmth, Purity and Goodness that is found in Jesus Christ.  And then no matter how difficult what comes after and no matter how hard his life may be there will always be a distant recollection, beyond the reach of accessible memories, where he touched God and he will long to return to that moment forever.

Such is the story of the human race.  For our shared history – no matter in how many ways it may have diverged afterwards - is the tragic account of how our first ancestors fell from their communion with God and gave us this broken world in which we now live.  So here we all are.  With a longing for something that we cannot explain and don’t know how to go about attaining.

And this is the reality of every person whether he wants to admit it or not.  You are either openly and actively seeking that Light or you are doing whatever you can to distract yourself from the fact that you want it so badly.  So, to those honest enough to admit that they are searching for something I say this.  Jesus is the very thing you have been seeking.  John 1:12-13 says that “As many as received Him, to them He gave the right to become children of God, to those who believe in His name, who were born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of a man, but of God.”

Complete and total acceptance by God.  That very thing that you have wanted your entire life, as far back as you can remember, that thing that has eluded you your whole life up until this point is a relationship with God.  He is the Author of every good thought, experience, emotion, feeling, relationship and so on that we have ever had.  And the longing that you feel is a longing to know your Creator.

This relationship has been made available to you by what Jesus did on the Cross and is being offered to you right now.  If your ears are open to what the Spirit is saying then you are hearing the Father calling you, from your deepest and most pleasant memories, from the simple times of your childhood, He is motioning for you to come to Him and to become His son, His daughter.  To become free again.  To become pure again.  To have a clean conscience again.  To have innocence again.  To be accepted fully in spite of all of your sins, flaws and quirks.  God loves you truly and deeply.  

Will you come to Him today?