“There’ll be scary ghost stories
And tales of the glories
Of Christmases long, long ago”

Nostalgia — the recalling of pleasant emotions from times past — is a wonderful part of the human experience, and imparts a wonderful warmth and intimacy to the close of the calendar year, especially in latitudes where warmth and sunshine are in very short supply. Nostalgia allows us to relive moments of our past with simplicity and purity, memories stripped of the inconveniences of real life that prevented us from fully enjoying those experiences at the time. Nostalgia is a creative enterprise, a cooperative effort of the memory and the imagination, that constructs a mythical world of times gone by out of fragments of events and wishful thinking.

As an emotional vacation, nostalgia is harmless enough. Only when it becomes a way of life — as it easily can — does it become a threat to our most precious gift: the future. Nostalgia the drug, when taken in too large a dose, can cause either a compulsive longing (when a return to the “good old days” becomes our fixation) or a sense of seething indignation (when we imagine the indignities and deprivations we once suffered), or both. When nostalgia in either of these forms becomes a way of life, particularly during the midlife transition, it can effectively lock the future in a stranglehold from which it cannot escape. Then hope — not wishful thinking, but the real hope that represents trust in a loving God — suffocates as well.

Each of us is engaged in a life-or-death struggle, and what’s at stake is nothing less than our very souls. If that statement sounds like religious fundamentalism, it is actually entirely the opposite. Our human souls are essentially creative, and meant to partner with a loving Creator to design and build a future of incredible possibility. We are expressions of the conscious driving force guiding and directing the evolution of the universe, no longer on the physical plane or the animate plane but in the realm of consciousness itself. As the mystic John of the Cross wrote allegorically about spiritual growth in terms of an ascent of a mountain (in The Ascent of Mount Carmel), after a certain level of growth, “beyond here there are no paths.” All the signposts of the past point us only to this decision-point. They can point us no further. Beyond this point, we walk only in blind trust of the Power that brought us this far. This is the maturity into which the midlife transition transforms us. Spiritual maturity is no country for the feint of heart.

Lurking in the background, calling to us ever more insistently, the voice of nostalgia warns us about going forward. If the creative Spirit is driving each individual forward in his or her personal evolution, then nostalgia, pulling us away from the unknown and back toward the safe haven of our imagination-scrubbed past, represents the forces of death and decay, masquerading as safety, security, self-interest, and even righteousness. Religious fundamentalism, whether represented by radical Moslems, Hindus, Christians, Marxists, Nazis, or free-market economists, represent men and women devoid of hope and without trust in Providence, however one chooses to define It. Rather, they represent humankind in midlife crisis, seeking quick and easy answers and emotional relief from the terror of the blank page that demands their writing on it in bold letters. Seeking refuge in nostalgic traditions can be the spiritual equivalent of writer’s block.

How can we move forward then into spiritual and humanitarian maturity? Ironically, it means recapturing our lost past. The ancients well understood that all ‘history’ is a distortion. As we have often heard, ‘history’ is the story as told by the winners. All memory is distorted by the same selective memory and enhanced by a similar imagination. The ancients realized that facts are of little consequence. Only their meaning really matters. To the ancients, myth — the attempt to distill meaning from the ‘facts’ — was what had importance, the ‘facts’ were simply an assemblage of meaningless data. If your personal evolution cannot be enhanced by your experience lending some significance to the present, then your experiences in the past has become little more than an emotional tranquilizer. Rather, the lessons of the past are what they are because they have the power to challenge and drive us beyond our reticence to face the terror of the unknown, the void, our future.

Sacred Scriptures are recognized as such not because they were dictated by an executive Deity to a dumb but faithful scribe. Humanity acknowledges writings as ‘sacred’ because those writings refuse to stay frozen in the past like some engraved tablets of stone, serving only as silent witnesses against an errant population. Rather, we recognize their Divine authorship because they stubbornly refuse to stay safely boxed up in the past. No, they live and breathe and enter into dialogue with us continually. What we see there today will be different from what we saw there yesterday, because we have evolved, and the world has evolved. The Word of God cannot be nostalgic, because it constantly challenges us onward toward our destiny to become hour by hour and day by day the image and likeness of our Creator: co-creators of something (our future) out of nothing (our past). Our hope embodies our commitment to become the people that we were always meant to be: regardless of whether or not we have any conception at all of who or what that may be.

It’s the holiday season. Go ahead and take your rest with smoking jacket and slippers, a pipe, a snifter of brandy, and a sentimental old book before a roaring fire, if that’s the form your reverie takes. Saunter down the path of nostalgia and, like Scrooge on the arm of the Ghost of Christmas Past, look in on happier times and enjoy the glow of fond memories. But come back to us. The Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come may be fearsome and shrouded in darkness, but that is the one in whose dread eyes you will see the reflection of your true Self. For in those eyes, terrifying though they may be, you’ll find real hope. Happy holidays and God bless us, every one!

H. Les Brown, MA, CFCC
Copyright © 2009 H. Les Brown

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