June 6, 2004

The imaginative part of the intellect, along with the free will, helps to set us apart from God’s other creatures. The imagination can learn from the past and plan for the future. Without the Holy Spirit, the imagination can be haunted by what was and intimidated by what will be. The imagination wrongly indulged romanticizes the past and fantasizes the future. Only humans are capable of nostalgia, which can be an innocent reverie, but which can also delude and deter us. The term is a composite of two Greek words: “nostos” means return and “algos” means pain. Just as neuralgia is a pain of the nervous system, so nostalgia, as the desire to return to past events as a kind of solace, inevitably results in pain. The refrain “You can’t go home again” becomes painfully apparent when we look at faded photographs of loved ones who have died, or revisit the homes and schools of one’s youth. Even St. John indulged a bit of nostalgia when he recounted how he outran St. Peter to reach the empty tomb of Jesus. The older he got, the fonder the recollection may have become, but arthritis or some Mediterranean infirmity would have reminded him that his running days were over. Nostalgia is a highly selective form of remembering. Sunsets can make past moments seem like a golden age, but each age has been a mix of good and bad. I should vastly prefer a twelfth century Gothic architect to most of today’s builders, but I should not want a twelfth century Gothic architect. I should prefer that Palestrina be in my choir loft rather than some folk guitarist left over from the 1970’s, but I also would prefer modern air conditioning and central heating.

The Apostles were not nostalgic about the Upper Room. They had many memories of that hallowed place: the Last Supper, the Resurrection appearances, the bestowal of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit moved their sensibility from nostalgia to hope. In a new book, Pope John Paul II reminisces about his fifty years as a bishop, but he calls it “Arise, Let Us Go”, words that Jesus spoke to the Apostles, moving them from nostalgia to expectation. The Holy Spirit of Pentecost explains the past without freezing us in it and shapes the future without making us daydreamers. Christianity is neither nostalgic about the past nor utopian about the future. It uses the power of the Holy Spirit to build on the past and prepare for the future. Cardinal Newman wrote: “God has created me to do him some definite service. He has committed some work to me which he has not committed to another. I have my mission. I may never know it is in this life, but I shall be told it in the next.” One day at a time.

Fr. George W. Rutler