Gill writes:
There’s a line in Life in a Northern Town that I always notice — ‘They sat on the stony ground…‘ It feels like a memory that you can feel too. I picture it like a still from a black-and-white film. A world that you half-remember, even if you never lived there.
Nostalgia does that. It wraps the past in warm light. It edits out the harsher edges. It makes yesterday feel safer than today.
The word itself is revealing. Nostalgia comes from two Greek words: nostos — homecoming and algos — pain. It literally means the pain of wanting to go home.
In the 17th century, nostalgia was considered a medical condition — a kind of homesickness that made soldiers physically ill. But the home it longs for is rarely a real place. More often, it’s a feeling. A time we can’t return to. A version of ourselves without all the ups and downs of life.
I’ve been reading Alexei Navalny’s memoir Patriot, and he makes a sharp observation: authoritarian leaders often trade in nostalgia. They promise a return to national greatness — a restoration of a world that was supposedly stable, ordered and morally clear. But as he notes, that world never really existed in the way it’s remembered. It’s a myth dressed up as a memory.
Nostalgia can be politically dangerous because it tells us the best days are behind us.
But it can be spiritually dangerous too.
Christian faith is not built on returning to a golden age. Scripture is astonishingly forward-facing. ‘Forget the former things,’ says Isaiah. ‘See, I am doing a new thing.‘ And in Revelation: ‘Behold, I am making all things new.’
Not restoring. Not rewinding. Not returning.
New.
There’s a difference between remembering with gratitude all that has gone before, and living in (and for) the past. Israel remembered — constantly — but always as a catalyst for movement. ‘Remember you were slaves in Egypt…’ not so you can go back, but so you can live differently now.
Sometimes when we say we long for ‘simpler times,’ what we really mean is we long for when we were simpler: our younger selves, when we were less aware of the world’s fragility. There’s something pastorally wise in naming that the ache for ‘simpler times’ is often grief for our own lost innocence. That kind of honesty can help us to reframe such longing. It acknowledges that the ache is real, but that the approach to it might need adjusting.
Nostalgia can feel to us like a gentle, harmless, even cosy place to be. To question it, especially with others, can seem mean-spirited and rude. But maybe by questioning it, asking why we are yearning for the past, is a way of protecting hope (yes – one of my favourite words is back again). We’re saying: we are not people who live facing backwards.
And it could be argued that that’s deeply biblical.
God is not found in an imagined golden yesterday. God is found in the wilderness ahead, and in the messy, frustrating present that you find yourself in. In the unfolding. In the becoming.
It’s funny, I guess, when you reflect that the Bible is a collection of stories from the past. Ancient words, ancient worlds. But the Word itself is not trapped there. It speaks. It moves. It breaks into the present tense. The gospel is not ‘once upon a time,’ rather it is ‘the kingdom is at hand.’ The same Spirit that hovered over creation hovers still — over this moment, this choice, this unfolding now.
Of course, the past will always sing to us. It will always sound warmer than today. But we don’t live in a northern town of memory. We live here. In this unfinished place. With all its cracks and possibilities.
And perhaps the bravest thing we can do is turn our faces forward and set them like flint.
The Friday Fix 