Those Good Old Days

I still remember the longing ache I felt during the fall of 2009. I was fourteen and had just started high school. A close childhood friend whose parents were overseas missionaries had briefly come back to town and left again, my grandfather who had lived down the street from me for as long as I could remember was declining with cancer, and I had struggled for years to build friendships with others my age. In the midst of all these changes, I found my mind drifting back to better moments, better times in my life than the ones I was living through. My imagination would often replay those moments: fishing with my grandfather, playing at the house where my friend had stayed, and being in elementary school, when friends weren’t so scarce and schoolwork wasn’t so all-consuming.

My longtime favorite piece of music is Augustín Barrios Mangoré’s “La Catedral: I. Preludio Saudade,” as its soft, simple notes invoked on the classical guitar immediately calm me and bring me back to fond moments from earlier in my life. It was only years after adopting it as my favorite that I learned that saudade is a Portuguese and Galician word meaning “melancholic nostalgia.” I don’t remember if, at fourteen, I knew this feeling to be nostalgia, but regardless of when I came to recognize it, nostalgia has been nearly ever-present for me. My life has been filled with many extraordinary blessings, but like everyone else, there has never been a period when some aspect of it was not a source of pain, grief, frustration, or uncertainty. And so, even in the midst of feelings of happiness, peace, and contentment, the sweetly melancholic song of nostalgia has never stopped echoing through the chambers of my heart.

Unlike most young people, I also followed US political and cultural news closely and lamented, along with the talk show hosts I watched, what I perceived to be governmental and moral declines in the nation, not to mention the recent economic fiasco of the Great Recession. Media personalities would recall “better” presidents and discuss what society was like in “better” eras of our country’s history, and I would think how much simpler, how much more peaceful, how much more reassuring it would have been to live in those times, under those leaders. Since then, through my studies as an American historian, most of the political and cultural elements of the nostalgia from that part of my life have evaporated.

Nostalgia is an experience common to human beings across societies and time periods. “Saudade” isn’t simply a Portuguese and Galician word; it’s a commonly expressed theme in the literature and music of the places that speak those languages. Most mythologies have legends of a human golden age in the distant past, and many of us have our own personal myths of our own golden ages earlier in our lives. Tapping into a collective nostalgia and promising to return a supposedly wayward and degraded nation to a purported former glory is a common theme in election campaigns and political rhetoric around the world. In the United States, this includes the now-loaded phrase “Make America Great Again,” employed most notably in the presidential campaigns of Donald Trump but also used in those of Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, and even the fictional Andrew Steele Jarret in Octavia E. Butler’s dystopian novel Parable of the Talents.

How, as Christians, ought we to view and react to the nostalgia in ourselves and others? Nostalgia can be a powerful force, both individually and collectively, and so it matters how we look at it and what we do with it. As Christians, this means we must allow our feelings of nostalgia to be shaped and directed by the gospel. Like other emotions, nostalgia may be morally neutral in itself. But just as with anger, sadness, or happiness, how we respond is a matter of moral decision-making and will either lead us to grow closer to Christ or further away. Like other emotions, unchecked nostalgia can cloud our view of reality. While it is sometimes true that our lives or societies were better (at least in certain ways) in previous years, memories conjured up by nostalgia tend to be rose-colored at best and actively distorted at worst. Often, our reminiscences end up in longing for the return of an imaginary idyllic past.

This past never existed – at least not in our lifetimes. The Bible teaches us that it did, in fact, exist at one time, not in 1950s America, the pre-Industrial Revolution countryside, or medieval Christendom, but rather in Eden. There was a time when humans lived in perfect harmony with God, each other, themselves, and the natural world. The Garden of Eden, and the world and cosmos around it, felt like home, in every sense of what we want that word to mean – the uninhibited presence of God with the perfect love, peace, joy, sense of belonging, assurance of safety, and promise of continuity that his presence provided. But with the rebellion of our first parents and the Fall of man, the reality of a perfect life and community – of a true home – vanished into the realms of memory and fantasy.

I’m convinced this memory didn’t die with Adam and Eve. We were made for Eden and all it represented, and so when we lost it, we lost part of ourselves as well. At its foundation, I believe this is what nostalgia is: Eden’s wound, an imprint in our souls left over from the paradise we lost when our first parents sinned. Without denying the reality of loved ones, good health, and joyful times that we remember with a longing ache when they are gone, I believe that beneath this longing is ultimately a longing for Eden, our true original home, and our pain is pain over its loss and the realization that this world in its fallen condition doesn’t live up to what “home” should feel like. Appropriately, the word “nostalgia” translated literally from its Greek origin roughly means “homesickness” (nostós meaning “homecoming” and álgos meaning “pain”).

Jeff Bennett, Wars on Kinkade 03 - Cottage Glow, digital artwork, 2013. Used by permission from Alien Artisan,

Recognizing Eden and its loss as the ultimate source of our longing is essential if we are to direct our nostalgia rightly, for opportunities abound to misuse it or allow it to be exploited by others. Believing that a perfect golden age ever existed for us individually or collectively in a fallen world distorts the past and sets an impossibly high standard by which to judge the present. On an individual level, viewing one’s childhood as golden ignores the struggles and uncertainties that attend every stage of life, including even the most carefree childhood. On a collective level, remembering any era as a golden age requires a lot of intentional or unintentional editing that excises the crises, fears, and injustices of that age. Imagining 1950s America as idyllic only works if you’re able to imagine yourself as a member of a homeowning white middle-class family who is somehow blissfully unaware of the ever-looming threat of a nuclear apocalypse and undisturbed by the hysterical pursuits by Senator Joseph McCarthy and others in power of any citizen suspected of “un-American activities.” Imagining pre-Reformation Christendom as idyllic requires even more selective forgetting: wars, famines, plagues, religious persecution, and the economic reality that nearly everyone was, by today’s standards, very poor. Similar points can be made about almost any manifestation of collective nostalgia, including that of my fellow Catholics who pine for the pre-Vatican II church or white residents of the American South who uncritically venerate their “heritage.”

When we airbrush our memories of the past, we open ourselves up to distorted views of the present and visualizations of the future, especially when opportunistically prompted to do so by those who promise to heal Eden’s wound and restore an idyllic life or society through earthly efforts – if only we buy their product, elect them to office, or support their policies. This inevitably ends up fostering attitudes of ingratitude, selfishness, and despair. We neglect to be thankful to God and others for the goods we have. We try to use our personal and political power to recreate our nostalgic fantasies, often at the expense of those around us and the most vulnerable in society. And ultimately, our powerlessness to create our personal Eden can drive us to feel that life will never be truly good again, leading us to become depressed or cynical.

Thankfully, there is a way to avoid these outcomes and direct our nostalgia wisely. We know that, in Christ, nothing good is lost forever. A perfect world was lost in Eden, but it will be restored in the New Jerusalem. If we believe the gospel, neither the glories of Eden nor the true treasures of our own earthly lives are eternally gone. Eden’s wound is a looking back, a longing for Eden, but in Christ it becomes a looking forward, a longing for the new heavens and the new earth, where our lives, communities, and societies will be completely and forever perfect. When we view nostalgia eschatologically, in light of Christ’s promised return, it becomes not only a lament, but also anticipation. This shift doesn’t necessarily eliminate the feeling, but it does transform how we respond to it.

In addition to Barrios, whose “La Catedral” never fails to take me back to my childhood, another artist whose work I enjoy for the same reason is Thomas Kinkade. Kinkade’s work is a more obvious and controversial example of nostalgic art. His signature scenes – typically marked by a cozy cottage or quaint village set against an idyllic natural background, rendered in vivid, light-infused colors – have proven to be wildly successful from a sales standpoint. You might have seen them in the waiting room of your dentist’s office or in your grandma’s living room. Critics of Kinkade’s work call it, at best, “sickeningly sentimental” and, at worst, conservative propaganda and “more nihilistic than anything Picasso and Pollock could paint, or Nietzsche and Sartre could write.” These critics have a point, as Kinkade’s work is specifically marketed as evoking “a profound sense of nostalgia” able to take one back “to a simpler time.” Kinkade even writes in the artist note on his painting Hometown Christmas Memories that he painted it “as a nostalgic embodiment of the images of my childhood” (despite it being set decades before he was born) and that he believes “everyone has a dream hometown buried somewhere in their subconscious.”

Admittedly, Kinkade’s work might evoke nostalgia that leads people to resent their present vocations and duties while pining for fantasized “happy golden days of yore.” Undoubtedly, these cozy images ignore or deny evils those “golden days” often involved, for everyone but especially for less privileged groups of people. For some Kinkade connoisseurs, the art can be part of a larger attitude of escapism, an attempt to shut out the ever-present brokenness of the world. (Kinkade himself was not immune from this brokenness, having led a troubled life and come to a tragic end.) These potential pitfalls, however, don’t render his art worthless or objectively bad. Despite what the critics will tell you, these images can be enjoyed healthily – if they are engaged with eschatologically, as I’ve suggested above. Kinkade’s works can be a source of Christian hope. The desire I and many others feel to live in a paradisiacal location or community, like those Kinkade depicts, can allow his work to be a visualization, using images we can comprehend, of the restoration of all creation to its perfect state when Christ comes back.

By viewing our nostalgia through the lens of the gospel and Christ’s coming kingdom, we can allow God to use it to produce good fruit in us. In Christ, the temptation toward ingratitude is transformed into thanks and praise to God, who, even in a fallen world, has given us so many glimpses of that perfection for which we were created. The temptation toward selfishness is transformed into a growing appreciation for those around us. Our longing to reach the land where we will see God face to face motivates us to ready ourselves by allowing God’s grace to work more fully in us. It also motivates us to bring God’s truth, beauty, and goodness to those around us, giving them glimpses of “the life of the world to come,” as the Nicene Creed says. We demonstrate “Christ in you, the hope of glory,” as Paul writes, by growing in virtue and building more just, compassionate, and loving communities. Through word and deed, we invite others to draw closer to Christ so that they, too, can find healing for their own wound left by Eden’s loss. Finally, the temptation toward despair is transformed into hope. In a broken world that is sickeningly saturated with evil, loss, and death, we know the day will come when God will make “all things new.”

So, when we listen to a Barrios piece, look at a Kinkade painting, visit our childhood home, or do whatever else it is that stirs a sense of nostalgia in us, may we let that art, object, or place spur us on to be followers of Christ and laborers for his kingdom and to place our living hope in his restoration of all things.