Nostalgia for the Day: For this is the Journey

I recently enjoyed a week off duty. It was much needed. There has been so much going on. I didn’t make too many firm plans other than to spend time with my mum and sisters and some very old friends. I also managed to have a conversation I have being trying to have for over twenty years. Last week I managed it and it has made a whole world of difference. I feel a new freedom and a new happiness, I just wish that here hadn’t been such a price to pay to get there. That said I am grateful that the aching yearning is not there and the wishful thinking of what could have been seems to have eased. I thank God for this.

I set off for home that Monday morning, past familiar signs and symbols on the M62 as you leave Lancashire and enter Yorkshire. As I drove, I listened to music that took me right back to my teenage years. As the rain fell stronger, it was siling down, I turned the music up louder and sang along, I was probably screaming as I passed Stott Hall Farm. The whole journey was a festival of nostalgia. As I was driving, I smiled to myself and remembered that nostalgia does mean a kind of homesickness, a longing for a place or a time that once was. We can of course never go back to that same time and place and even if we could it would never be as we remembered it. No one ever steps in the same river twice. Why? Well because the river is not the same and neither is the person who steps into it.

Here's what I was singing along to in the car

 

Last week was a journey home, a step back in time, an experience of nostalgia. That said it was an experience of all these things in the present day. I had gone home with a sense of sickness, homesickness if you like but returned revived and revitalised prepared to journey on

Nostalgia is an interesting word. Like so many words it has changed in meaning over time. Originally it meant “severe homesickness considered as a disease” from the German heimweh (home+woe) homesickness. It is rooted in the ancient Greek words “algos” meaning pain, Grief, distress and “nostos” meaning homecoming. Nostalgia is a painful homecoming.

There is a similar Welsh word “Hiraeth” which is a mixture of longing, yearning, nostalgia, wistfulness or an earnest desire for the Wales of the past. The Cornish and Breton equivalents are "hireth" and "hiraezh"

Don’t we all yearn for a time long gone at times. I do wonder if times were ever as we imagine them to be, whether good or bad. The yearning and nostalgia may well be for a past that never was. My grandfather always said there was no such thing as the good old days, no idealised time. Life was tough, much tougher back then. I know he was scarred by the loss of younger brother at a young age, from appendicitis. People of his generation were used to the loss of children, something we have not been accustomed to in our day and age. I have been thinking of this a lot these last 18 months, particularly with the response in some quarters to medical developments. So many childhood killer diseases have been irradicated, sadly in recent years some have returned.

We cannot, should not ,live in the past, it is rarely as we remember it. That said neither should we just disown the past, just let it go. This is not healthy either. What is vital is to find peace with the past and to help that bring it alive the moment in which we live and thus create a future in which we can all live, to build the land where we bind up the broken and where captives can finally be free. Even if that is just ourselves, which of course it is not. Life is never just about ourselves and our personal freedoms. I sometimes feel that this fetishization of the present is another symptom of a growing self-centredness. There is another danger too, the failure to learn from our mistakes made in the past. Do we learn the lessons from history? Well, it would appear not. The horrible scenes in Afghanistan this week seem to prove this once again.

I have over the last few days sought solace in the writing of Forrest Church. He was a powerful influence on my early years as a minister. One of the many principles that Forrest lived by was “nostalgia for the present”. He described this as embracing each day as it passes instead of ruing it after it has gone. Or “looking forward to the present” which he has described as enjoying what you have as if in a state of anticipation rather than aching longingly for that which likely will never be.

This became particularly pertinent during the last years of his life as he was dying of Oesophageal cancer. He discovered that he could practice what he had always preached. Something he learnt over years of pastoral ministry, as he shared in the lives of so many people, especially those at the ends of theirs. As he wrote himself “I have seen people in the last weeks of their lives live every moment more fully than they ever have before, because they recognise what most of us don’t in our daily living: that each moment is precious.” That even in those last moments of life there is a potential for peace, beauty and completion.

I remember a Unitarian ministerial colleague tell me that he had become convinced of God’s presence in life during those moments that he shared with people just before they died. That something was happening in those moments that he cannot begin to describe, all that he knows is that life took on a different meaning in those moments and that he himself was transformed by being present there and then. The conversation has stayed me, it has fed my daily life and it keeps speaking to me. I have experienced the same truth over the years as I have shared openly and intimately with people and not just at the end of their lives. Those spots of time moments, when I have touched something deeper. I have experienced it once again these last few days. As I have stepped into and re-experienced the past, including moments of the deepest pain and even opened some old wounds from past, I didn’t bleed too much. As I have done so I have been better able to connect with the day in which I am living and feel fully present in life and thus experience less fear of what is yet to come on this beautiful journey that is life. As they say life is a journey.

Life is often described as a journey that moves from one stage to another, sometimes full of joy and sometimes full of fear. Like the seasons life is forever changing. My life has taken me to different stages and I have journeyed with a rich variety of people. Some have been there from the very beginning, some I have joined and stayed with and others I have travelled with for only a short time. They have all touched and blessed my life in deep, rich and meaningful ways and I hope I have blessed theirs likewise.

I heard a lovely example of this week where it seems I did. I conducted a huge funeral this week for a local dignitary. Afterwards a woman approached me to thank me for helping her son a few years ago. Dan the man as she called him. As a teenager he had struggled with himself and to come out as gay. He came to see me and even spent a few months with the congregation, his family were Anglican. She told how much I had helped him come to terms with himself and that he was thriving. She said he would be thrilled when she would tell him later than he had seen me. We do really do not know the impact we have on others, whether positive or negative. There is no neutrality in life. Everything we do and everything we do not matters. Matter truly matters. Never be indifferent in life, for life itself is surely not.

Life is a journey they say, who am I to argue. What I would say though is that the journey is not really one of distance. If you think about it we don’t really go anywhere, or not too far. We are limited by the confines of this beautiful spinning planet, unless you are an astronaut or a multi-billionaire like Elon Musk or Richard Branson who indulge your fantasy of blasting off into space. For most folk the life journey is not one of distance, but rather depth. It is an inner journey, what some have called the spiritual journey. The wonderful farmer poet Wendell Berry captured this beautifully in his poem “A Spiritual Journey”

"A Spiritual Journey"

And the world cannot be discovered by a journey of miles,
no matter how long,
but only by a spiritual journey,
a journey of one inch,
very arduous and humbling and joyful,
by which we arrive at the ground at our feet,
and learn to be at home.

by Wendell Berry

Many folk, in spiritual circles often speak of “The daily journey”. This is a very strange thing to say, it doesn’t make sense. You see “journey” means what you do in a day. So, when you say daily journey, what you are actually meaning is your daily, daily. The word journey is derived from the Latin word "diarnum" meaning daily portion from which the old French word "jornee" which meant a day’s work or a day's travel, is derived. I love this truth, it makes me smile broadly. Of course, any spiritual journey can only be taken one day at a time. That said we do not walk innocently into it, all that we are, all that we have been and all that we have experienced is a part of us, the journey before becomes part of the journey of the day, which leads us into an unknown future, but one in which we can travel well, if we can learn the lessons from the past.

Life is a beautiful journey. What are you going to do with the day?

A question to leave you with.

I say…

Let us journey on. Let us live each day and live it well. Not by forgetting the past, or living in fear of it, but by allowing it to truly inhabit our daily tasks. Let us live with nostalgia for the present, by embracing our daily task, and embracing the beautiful journey, rather than ruing it after it has gone. Let us look forward to the present by making the most of what we have with a sense of anticipation for what might yet be rather than an aching longing for what will likely never be.

Let us journey on and journey home, whatever our daily tasks might be.

Here is a video devotion based on the material in theis "blogspot"