Nostalgia's Sting
Minister's Letter: April 2024
Dear Grace Church,
It’s now over four weeks ago but I just wanted to say a public thanks to all those who helped out over the Easter Weekend. It was a real highlight for me as we gather together to commemorate and celebrate Jesus’s death and resurrection.
At Easter Praise, I spoke briefly how the Cross of Christ is the ongoing evidence of God’s ongoing love for his people. That moment in history is held out to help us to continue forward in the life God has called us into. But there’s a danger that we all face when we look back at the past, which is when there’s an excessive emphasis on nostalgia. That is because nostalgia keeps us in the past and stops us moving forward.
In 2019, the Hovis advert ‘The Bike’ was voted as Britain’s most heartwarming and iconic advert. For some, even mentioning this will evoke fond memories and vivid images not just of the advert but of sitting before a TV with family listening to Dvorak’s Ninth’s Symphony as a young man cycled to the top of steep hill in Dorest to deliver a loaf of bread. Some might even well remember the Two Ronnies homage to it. And at the end, as the load of Hovis is laid on the table, the words come up on the screen:
“As good for you today
as it’s always been”
Nostalgia both stirs the spirit and it sells products well.
In the first couple of weeks of March, I found myself listening to the same section of Exodus being preached in three different churches. The verse below captures the sentiment of Israel precisely:
The Israelites said to them, ‘If only we had died by the LORD’s hand in Egypt! There we sat round pots of meat and ate all the food we wanted, but you have brought us out into this desert to starve this entire assembly to death.’
-Exodus 16.3
This is remarkable because in the chapter just before we have the story of how God turned bitter water sweet to refresh a weary people. And immediately before that is recorded their great song of celebration for their liberation from slavery in Egypt. It’s incredible really how in such a short period they turn against God and his Prophet. In just a month and a half they moved from singing to whinging.
When we are discontent in our present situations our memories can so easily be distorted into a nostalgia that does not stack up with reality.
And this retelling of their time in Egypt does not stack up with reality. The claim that they could eat however much they wanted does not stand up to scrutiny. They were under a heavy bondage of slavery, subject to the whims of a cruel Pharoah. Their days and weeks and months were years were dedicated solely to hard labour building store cities for Egypt.
Now here they are are in the wilderness, following the God who rescued and freed them. They were unsure where their next meal would come from. Instead of praying and pleading with the God who has protected and provided for them, they moaned together and grumbled about Moses and God. And so they look back with the rose tinted lenses of nostalgia and yearn for a life that never really was.
Over the last week, I’ve been reading the stimulating book Nostalgia by Agnes Arnold-Foster. The first recorded medical case of nostalgia was by Johannes Homer in the last 17th century. He called it ‘Maladie du Pays’. It literally means illness of the land. Nostalgia to us is just an inconsequential sentimental feeling. Arnold-Foster writes originally that “it was an illness associated with being uprooted, a sickness of displacement, a kind of sadness or depression that arose from the desire to return to one’s home.” Nostalgia used to be an actual illness which led to physical symptoms of lethargy and heart problems. It was found in those who had left behind their home for an extended period of time and pined for what had been lost. While it is not as dramatic as that in the modern world, nostalgia can still be an intense longing for something that is out of reach in the past.
It is legitimate to suggest that during this experience in the wilderness after the exodus, the people of Israel were being actively tempted by the Deceiver. When Jesus spent 40 days in the desert and tempted by the Devil (Luke 4.1-11), it was a deliberate echo of Israel’s wanderings in the wilderness. Therefore, we can imagine Satan whispering into the hearts of Israel, stirring up discontent during their sojourn on the way to the Promised Land.
Playing on their disgruntlement in their present situation, he would have breathed half truths about their time in Egypt. He gets them to focus on the (little) food they had but not the quality of life there. This is the issue when we become besotted with our nostalgic view of the past. We pass over that which was uncomfortable or uncertain or unpleasant. Nostalgia is a great marketing tool to lure people in.
The above is a scene from Mad Men, a TV show set in an advertising agency in New York in the sixties. Dom Draper, the main character notes that something new piques our interest but if you can establish a nostalgic link, it forges a “deeper bond with the product”. It’s a compelling speech and scene which demonstrates the potency of nostalgia in drawing in customers.
In a similar way, the Devil can lure us away from the path to our new life by using nostalgia to draw us back to the old. Egypt can be made to look like a home when it was only ever a prison. Our old lives can be made to look easy and comfortable when they were anything but that.
The devil doesn’t want us moving forward and upward. But God desires for us to grow. Not by ignoring the past but seeing the signs of his faithfulness and goodness and them acting as prompts to spur us onward as we travel to our new home. For our new home is so much more glorious than anything this world has ever given us.
I know I am prone to long for what is lost. But God says he will never lose us. And what he has in store for us can never be matched and will certainly be ours. So I’m going to leave behind those sepia tinted lenses and am going to take up my cross and follow my King.
In Christ,
Ciarán R. Kelleher
April Treat
A wonderful story of gospel partnership and God’s faithfulness.