Nostalgia It is a trait of human nature, not just to be able to remember the past, but seemingly to relish and love doing so. People cherish sentimental objects from long ago, they preserve love letters and other such tokens of their personal history, they pore over the mementos of their youth, they visit and adorn the graves of their loved ones, they reminisce over old photographs, and in innumerable other ways yearn for yore, as if seeking to restore and relive it, pausing to muse on these reminders of what once was — and, perhaps, over what was to be but never was. While some are more wistful than others, everyone indulges nostalgia. This is strange, if not surprising, considering that it is bittersweet. In fact, “nostalgia” comes from two Greek words (nostos, “homecoming,” and algos, “pain”) which were combined “around the time of the American Revolution as a medical term for melancholia caused by homesickness” ( Family Word Finder , pg. 540). Perhaps this is nowhere more evident than in reunions of military veterans who gather to remember wartime experiences. They do this though much of what they recall hurts. Looking at photographs of deceased loved ones might be pleasant, but the memories they evoke still bear an underlying ache from the consciousness that they are gone beyond reach. It is hard to say that something so natural, so much an instinctual, even unique, part of the human psyche could be wrong or bad. Indeed, it can be very detrimental not to remember the past. All learning requires it. Even the moral component in remembering the past is evoked by the aphorism of the philosopher, George Santayana, who said, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” It is not difficult to discern the drive behind nostalgia. It is a reversion to the past. None can relive it, but one can approach it by vividly remembering it, aided by its physical remnants. Thus, when a man lingers and muses over a childhood photograph of himself, for a brief moment, he is able to return in his mind to a time when the future, not yet made, can again be contemplated with promise, hope, and optimism — when the mistakes to be made are, not only not yet made, but do not have to be made — to a time when things could be so much better than they might have turned out to be. He can go back to a place where life was young and fresh and vistas of opportunity opened before him. Perhaps no one captures this better than William Faulkner in his Intruder in the Dust , when he describes how the moment just before Confederate general George Pickett’s disastrous charge at Gettysburg is conceived: “For every Southern boy fourteen years old, not once but whenever he wants it, there is the instant when it’s still not yet two o’clock on that July afternoon in 1863 … . It’s all in the balance, it hasn’t happened yet, it hasn’t even begun yet, it not only hasn’t begun yet but there is still time for it not to begin … .” These words apply to every sad or tragic event in life. The artifacts of the past can transport one back to a time when the mind can entertain the fantasy that what happened need not happen. Time cannot be recaptured nor history retrieved and changed. Yet, mistakes do not have to be repeated. Indeed, going forward, they can be cancelled out. The past can be made a springboard to a future better than the past itself. Paul’s assertion that he forgot what lay behind (Phil. 3:13,14) seems strange in view of the fact that he so often recalled it (cf. vss. 5,6). Yet, he forgot it in that he did not allow it to control his future. Nostalgia must be something more than an empty, self-indulgent, stultifying wallowing in melancholia. Instead, the past must be allowed to teach and reach toward a better future.