by Graham Edwards.
A few weeks ago, on the Spring Bank Holiday, I was at Cliff College for the festival. As I wandered about the site, I could not help but remember the days when I was an undergraduate student there over twenty years ago. I remembered people, and events; I remembered that the college doors were locked every weeknight at 10:30pm and the creativity needed to get in if you ended up locked out; I remembered the challenge of morning prayers at 7.45am! A rush of nostalgia filled me. “Ah,” I thought “the good old days…” Nostalgia is an easy thing to fall into, and sometimes it is a nice, comfortable thing as we reminisce with friends and family. Sometimes of course, nostalgia can move us to say “it was better in the old days” or some variation of that. In the life of the church I sometimes hear things such as “it used to be so full in here you had to stand for a service”, “in my day the minster visited every member once a week before dinner on a Monday”, “we used to have a hundred children in our Sunday School” and so on. Nostalgia is, perhaps, natural, but I wonder what it might do as we share life of the church.
Firstly, I think nostalgia can help us preserve the heart of our communities. The memories that we have and share, hold a meaning-making power in the community of the church. Clay Routledge, Tim Wildschut, Constantine Sedikides, Jacob Juhl and Jamie Arndt (2012) point out that nostalgia has four psychological functions: it generates positive affect; enhances self-esteem; “serves as a repository for social connectedness” (p. 453) and fosters understanding of positive experiences. As we tell stories of church experiences, we remind ourselves to look beyond our current experience, the stories enable us to recognise that our history connects us to something ‘larger than [our]selves’: and when we are trying to make sense of our present challenges, we are reminded that our belonging is rooted in that larger context (Sakaranaho, 2011, p. 153). Nostalgia and memory does not, as Hervieu-Léger (2000) argues, simply transmit religion and faith from one generation to the next; it is how we continue to build community. Rooted in ‘our experience,’ and the memory of ‘us,’ our memories enlighten the present, we tell the stories because they remind us who we are and what we are about, so that we might make sense of the present.
Secondly, nostalgia can become a form of lament. Sometimes we want to acknowledge what we feel we have lost, the things that have changed, and the things that we wish we could recapture. Lamenting the changes in our experience of church might frustrate some, but it can be important. John Swinton (2007) argues that the church needs to reclaim the process of lamentation. He understands lament as providing a language through which pain and anguish can be brought to God, and therefore he says it becomes an act of faith. He writes ‘lament spurs movement towards God at a time when our natural instinct is to move away’ (p. 114). It would be wrong therefore, I think, to claim that directing anger or frustration toward God in a time of suffering, sadness, or challenge is inappropriate, rather it may be considered an act of true faith, seeking to bring those emotions before God. The telling of stories, the shared nostalgia may sometimes be a way in which we hold our experience before God and seek a response.
There is, of course, another place where we tell stories and sometimes engage in nostalgia – a funeral. We tell the story of the deceased as we grieve and offer thanks for their life, and to remind ourselves of those things we loved and found challenging about them, as we gather to celebrate the promise of new life.
Perhaps, then we should enjoy some nostalgia, enjoy telling our stories, not simply to wallow in the past and “how good it used to be.” Rather, we remind ourselves who we are and what we are all about, to lament the things we have lost, as we gather in the community of the church with God’s promise of new life.
Hervieu-Léger, D. (2000). Religion as a Chain of Memory. Polity Press.
Routledge, C., Wildschut, T., Sedikides, C., Juhl, J., & Arndt, J. (2012). The Power of the Past: Nostalgia as a Meaning-Making Resource. Memory, 20(5), 452 – 460.
Sakaranaho, T. (2011). Religion and the Study of Social. Temenos, 47(2), 135-158.
Swinton, J. (2007). Raging with Compassion. Eerdmans.
Theology Everywhere 
Thanks Graham, I am now picturing you breaking creatively into Cliff College! Seriously though I think you make some good points regarding nostalgia, the need to tell our stories, the possibility of turning those stories and the emotions that rise from them to prayer, to lament, the chance to bring our memories to God, to acknowledge our bewilderment and sense of loss. I certainly encountered it last week when I led funerals for 3 members, stories were told, memories were shared, there was a sense of celebration and a time for sorrow and lament, things aren’t what they were for sure.
There is time for lament, there is also a time I believe and as Helen Cameron so beautifully reminded us on Saturday for truth telling, when we lament our empty chairs or pews we need to listen to the culture around us, our worship may indeed be beautiful to our ears and sensibilities but does it connect? In our truth telling we also need to deal with the fact that what we have offered in the past may have caused harm, one family of siblings asked me if they could come into the church before the funeral simply so that they could feel settled enough in themselves to cope with the actual funeral itself! I was looking at a trauma response, from their responses that was obvious. The past cases review happened for a reason.
As a minister I am also conscious that we are often held responsible for the demise of what was, if only we visited every member of the congregation before dinner on Monday as he did, ( and it was always he), there is no acknowledgement of change in the way we work, he probably cared for 2, maybe 3 churches, not 6,7,or 8 as many of us do, he was probably around the same age as his congregants, I hear sorties of shared baby sitting, one of those babysat for is now a minister himself! I cannot do what he did, I simply don’t have the capacity or support system, I don’t have a wife at home running my home, I am a single minister, and I don’t get invited for Sunday lunch as some of my single male counter-parts do! The culture of church is interesting, and 50 years on for some female ministers are still a novelty. I have been the first woman presbyter in 5 of the churches I have served in my 15 years of ministry!
Finally I pick up on another of Helen Cameron’s challenges from her address on Saturday, that while we sing best of all is God is with us, we must acknowledge the truth that God is not only with us, that God is indeed at work in our wider communities, working through the gifts and graces of the people they have created, and we need to ask ourselves how we join in, we need to look forward with humility and with the stance of listening, with grace and with the acknowledgement that we don’t have all of the answers. I have said many times that the church of tomorrow will not look anything like the church of today. We do need reminding who we are, because we do have the power to accept ourselves and find ourselves to be the much loved children of God!
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