home – Mysteries and Manners

A brief look at nostalgia

October 30, 2019

Did you know you can play old versions of Oregon Trail, and apparently other computer games of a bygone era, for free online?

I discovered this through friends a couple of years ago when we were reminiscing about computer-typing classes in grade school, and how most of our time was actually spent trekking across the pixelated wilderness and losing beloved family members one-by-one to dysentery. Well, we promptly fired up the old game on a web browser and marveled, appreciatively, at the ancient graphics.

This morning, another Buzzfeed article popped up on my Facebook newsfeed, trying to remind me of all the childhood memorabilia and literature I’ve forgotten about. Boxcar children, anyone? Slinkies?

And I’m sure you’ve noticed the avalanche of reboots and sequels in the movie industry in the past five or ten years. From live-action or CGI new versions of classic Disney animations to new iterations of Spiderman and Batman, from Sherlock and Endeavor to one last Gilmore Girls, from Star Trek to Marvel to Star Wars, it seems like there’s no end to this digging up and repackaging of old treasures.

Why, I wonder?

I mentioned in my last post that the biggest problem with the new Star Wars franchise seems to be difficulties with story-telling, with crafting tight and compelling plots. Is it that we are having a harder time telling good stories—and so we must keep looking back to the older stories that once compelled us?

Yet some of these reboots end up not only being updates but also critiques; as The Last Jedi was for Star Wars, and I imagine Joker is for Batman (haven’t seen it), and the live-action Beauty and the Beast was for the un-woke original.

But all the reboots, whether they be homages, inferior repetitions or edgy critiques, are riding on the powerful engines of nostalgia. That’s why we go to see these things, even when we already know the plot by heart. That’s why we click on the Buzzfeed articles. That’s why we play Oregon trail with our friends. We want to feel nostalgia—or, we want to sharpen the nostalgia we are almost always already feeling under the surface.

This term nostalgia, though it’s based on Greek words nóstos (“homecoming”) and álgos (“pain”), isn’t actually quite as old as it sounds. It was coined in the 17th century by Swiss physician Johannes Hofer and originally used to describe the severe homesickness of Swiss mercenary soldiers.

Though it means something like “the pain of homecoming,” it’s a kind of pain that a lot of us rather enjoy.

Remember this?

Yeah. Abrams is really good at nostalgia.

It’s a concept that is increasingly interesting to me.

I think that nostalgia in a more literal sense, as a longing for one’s homeland, is a timeless part of being human, attested to throughout the ages. One thinks of Odysseus:

Nevertheless I long—I pine, all my days—
to travel home and see the dawn of my homecoming.
And if a god will wreck me yet again on the wine-dark sea,
I can bear that too, with a spirit tempered to endure.
Much have I suffered, labored long and hard by now
in the waves and wars. Add this to the total—
bring the trial on! (Book V)

Or the exiles in Babylon remembering Jerusalem with intense grief in Psalm 137:

By the rivers of Babylon
We sat and wept, remembering Zion.
There on poplars we hung our harps
For there our captors asked us for songs;
Our tormentors, for joy:
“Sing for us a song of Zion!”
But how could we sing a song of the Lord
in a foreign land?

Or in Genesis, beyond the punishment of toil and pain in childbirth, the irrevocable sense of banishment from home:

“He expelled the man, stationing the cherubim and the fiery revolving sword east of the garden of Eden, to guard the way to the tree of life.” (3:24)

Yes, nostalgia has been with us for a long time. But I wonder if some of the strains we’re experiencing now aren’t a little different than those expressed by Odysseus and the Jewish people and our first parents. We seem less desirous today of specific places than of specific times—or, really, experiences.

A famous example of modern nostalgia is the experience of the titular character in The Great Gatsby, a novel I’ve always thought rather underwhelming except for passages like this—and these are the last words of the book:

And as I sat there brooding on the old, unknown world, I thought of Gatsby’s wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock. He had come a long way to this blue lawn, and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.
Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter—to-morrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. . . . And one fine morning—
So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

Oof. Now that’s nostalgia—but in a distinctly modern key; it’s the kind that merges a hoped-for future with the dreamt-of past, a past that probably never really existed no matter how much we insist that it did. It’s a longing for an experience rather than for a specific place, or even really a specific time. Gatsby loves what Daisy represents for him; not Daisy herself.

Christmastime nostalgia is a bit like this, I think. “I’ll Be Home for Christmas” resonates with us so deeply not just because of the song’s original purpose in honoring soldiers serving overseas, but rather because the “home” it describes really is the stuff of “dreams.” One cannot really ever get there, even if you beat the traffic and are blessed enough to go to the house you grew up in and spend the holidays with your family.

So much of our modern and post-modern experience, even for the most forward-thinking and progressive among us, seems to be tinged with nostalgia. There are hopes for a Friends reboot or The Office (it only ended in 2013!). Stranger Things, though very much a unique show, relies heavily on nostalgia for 80’s pop-culture. Why?

It would be interesting for those more informed than I to look at the Classical education movement through this lens as well, or even the traditional Latin Mass movement. I say this with respect: there seems to be a strange kind of longing in those communities for something that never really was—at least, not quite in the way we now imagine it to have been.

I have no conclusive thoughts on all this. I think that maybe our contemporary preoccupation with nostalgia might have something to do with how home has been problematized—we are far more mobile and global; we identify less with specific places, much less with nationalities. There seems to be no home to long for—but there are still memories, and experiences that, when excavated by memory, look rather like home.

But Billy Collins has a poem entitled “Nostalgia” we could end with, for now:

Remember the 1340s? We were doing a dance called the Catapult.
You always wore brown, the color craze of the decade,
and I was draped in one of those capes that were popular,
the ones with unicorns and pomegranates in needlework.
Everyone would pause for beer and onions in the afternoon,
and at night we would play a game called “Find the Cow.”
Everything was hand-lettered then, not like today.
Where has the summer of 1572 gone? Brocade and sonnet
marathons were the rage. We used to dress up in the flags
of rival baronies and conquer one another in cold rooms of stone.
Out on the dance floor we were all doing the Struggle
while your sister practiced the Daphne all alone in her room.
We borrowed the jargon of farriers for our slang.
These days language seems transparent, a badly broken code.
The 1790s will never come again. Childhood was big.
People would take walks to the very tops of hills
and write down what they saw in their journals without speaking.
Our collars were high and our hats were extremely soft.
We would surprise each other with alphabets made of twigs.
It was a wonderful time to be alive, or even dead.
I am very fond of the period between 1815 and 1821.
Europe trembled while we sat still for our portraits.
And I would love to return to 1901 if only for a moment,
time enough to wind up a music box and do a few dance steps,
or shoot me back to 1922 or 1941, or at least let me
recapture the serenity of last month when we picked
berries and glided through afternoons in a canoe.
Even this morning would be an improvement over the present.
I was in the garden then, surrounded by the hum of bees
and the Latin names of flowers, watching the early light
flash off the slanted windows of the greenhouse
and silver the limbs on the rows of dark hemlocks.
As usual, I was thinking about the moments of the past,
letting my memory rush over them like water
rushing over the stones on the bottom of a stream.
I was even thinking a little about the future, that place
where people are doing a dance we cannot imagine,
a dance whose name we can only guess.

Home and the Joyful Mysteries II

July 21, 2015

In my first post I described something I had never noticed before about the Joyful Mysteries of the rosary – that they all seem to present the idea of home in profound ways.

I was particularly attuned to this idea because I had been looking for a house to rent with a few friends with no success.

The day after praying that rosary, by the way, we got a house!

4. The Presentation of Jesus in the Temple – God’s House

The Gospel of Luke tells us that Mary and Joseph brought Jesus to the Temple in Jerusalem after his circumcision to present Him to the Lord. The Temple was the house of God, the locus of His presence. In the Holy of Holies rested the Ark of the Covenant. So it was God’s earthly home, and the home of His people.

The Jews made yearly pilgrimages to the temple to celebrate the Passover. They remembered their own ancestors’ search for home after being freed from slavery in Egypt. Is that not what the Promised Land was really about? It was to be a place of belonging for the Israelites.

The Psalms speak of the temple with such longing:

Better is one day in your courts than a thousand elsewhere;

I would rather be a doorkeeper in the house of my God

than dwell in the tents of the wicked. (Psalm 84:10)

Even our word “nostalgia” comes from the Greek nostos, which means homecoming. That’s what Odysseus’ complex, wandering journey was all about. Interestingly, the other part of the word, algos, means “pain” in Greek. So although we have diluted the use of the word in English to a mere sentimentalism, it’s original meaning expresses the fourth mystery of the Rosary quite well.

Presentation_of_the_Lord — via ncregister.org

Interestingly, when Mary and Joseph bring Jesus to the Temple, they encounter Simeon, a mysterious old man who “takes the child in his arms” and prophesies about Jesus’ ultimate destiny as Savior. Simeon tells Mary that “a sword will pierce your heart also” (Lk 2:35). So, although this journey to the Temple is a homecoming in some sense — most profoundly for Jesus, because this is His “Father’s House,” as He will say later — it is an encounter overshadowed by future suffering.

5. The Finding of Jesus in the Temple – God’s house

The fifth Joyful Mystery is very much a sequel to the second. We see Simeon’s prophesy about the sword piercing Mary’s heart coming true already.

jesus-at-the-temple-by-brian-jekel.277103818_std — via catholicbookwriter.com

The twelve year old Jesus has been missing for three days, and his parents have been searching for him everywhere. Of course they cannot go “home” to Nazareth without him, and in a deeper sense there really is no such thing as home without him. They finally go to the Temple and find him there, astonishing all of the elders and teachers with his understanding.

Mary, although I imagine very relieved, is understandably still very upset: “Son, why have you done this to us? Your father and I have been looking for you with great anxiety.”

Jesus’ response is (at first glance) irritating and (at second glance) rather mysterious: “And he said to them, “Why were you looking for me? Did you not know that I must be in my Father’s house?”

So already Jesus is defining his home, his identity, with God the Father. He seems to take for granted that Mary and Joseph must realize this. His Father’s house is not Joseph’s house in Nazareth, but here in Jerusalem. But later He will no longer identify the temple as his home, but rather will express his homelessness: “Foxes have dens and birds have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head” (Mt 8:20).

This, of course, is not literally true. The Gospels identify Peter’s house in Capernaum as a “resting place” for Jesus. And I am sure Mary, if she was not always following among her son’s disciples, would always have welcomed him home to the house in Nazareth. But Jesus is expressing a much more profound homelessness here, the homelessness not only of the “Son of Man,” but of all men.

Finally Jesus will predict the destruction of “my Father’s house” and identify this temple with His own body: “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up” (John 2:19). Ultimately Jesus Himself is the locus of God’s presence, not a building or tent of any kind. He gives to all of us our true homecoming.

Home and the Joyful Mysteries

July 6, 2015

My prayers, as Flannery O’Connor says somewhere, are more dogged than devout and this is especially the case with the rosary. I do not pray it every day, probably because I find it so difficult, but nevertheless I take comfort in the rosary like I take comfort in the Mass: if you show up, you’re there. Similarly, if you say the prayers, you’ve prayed. You can say with some confidence that you have actually prayed the rosary whether or not your effort felt very successful. This approach might arise from strange mixture of laziness and scrupulosity on my part, but I can tell you in the drier areas of the prayer desert the bare-bones structure of the rosary and of the Mass have helped me a great deal.

Well, today was little different except for the fact that I found something in the Joyful Mysteries I had never noticed before.

Recently I have been very stressed out about finding a new place to live. A couple of friends and I have been on the house hunt since the end of May. Unfortunately, the three of us never seem to be in Denver at the same time this summer. I’m in Boston as I write this. Moreover, the housing market in Denver has become extremely competitive in the last few years, and trying to find an affordable place on three teachers’ salaries is no easy task.

I’ve written before as well how the idea of home has been problematic for me in the past few years, and is also problematic, I imagine, for a lot of transient young adults and likely for many of my own students.

So I suppose homes and houses have been on my mind. But I had never noticed before how much the concept of Home, in all of its spiritual complexity, is present in the Joyful Mysteries of the rosary. And that was the gift I received in prayer today.

1 – The Annunciation – Home in Mary

annunciation2 — Henry Ossawa Turner, “The Annunciation” via ncregister.com

Christian tradition has since ancient times associated Mary with the Church, but also with the Tabernacle of the Lord – that is, the Ark of the Covenant from the Old Testament. The Ark of the Covenant, you probably know, was the dwelling place of the Lord of Hosts before the construction of the Temple in Jerusalem. And even after the Temple’s construction, completion, and various re-buildings, the Ark was placed in the Holy of Holies there. And so Mary is the Ark of the New Covenant.

God comes to Mary in this mystery of the rosary to make His home inside of her. Mary’s womb becomes the first home of Jesus, and it is a proper home for Him because of her purity and openness to God. She welcomes Him into her house, so to speak, even though she is afraid. She is the perfect Temple of the Holy Spirit that St. Paul will preach about later (1 Cor 6:19).

And yet John says in his Gospel, of this moment, that “the Word became flesh and pitched his tent among us” (Jn 1:14). The Greek word is usually translated “dwelt” – as in “dwelt among us” – but it literally means “to pitch a tent” – which is so much more evocative and moving. A tent is a temporary home. God leaves heaven to become a wanderer with us. As Jesus says later, “Foxes have their holes and birds have their nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay His head” (Mt 8:20). He knows what it means, also, to be homeless.

2 – The Visitation – Home in Elizabeth

1356113864 — via stjosephcathedraltriplev.weebly.com

This is about as homey a mystery as there is, and has always been my favorite mystery of the rosary. Mary leaves her home in Nazareth to visit her pregnant cousin Elizabeth in a beautiful gesture of love. The journey was actually about 100 miles! Yet I have also always thought that, upon hearing of Elizabeth’s miraculous pregnancy, Mary could not help but want to be with the only other woman in the world who would understand what she herself was going through. Their meeting has always been to me the model of true Christian friendship.

And notice, again, the welcoming in this scene. Elizabeth greets Mary with joy and with understanding – she recognizes her at once as “the Mother of my Lord” (Lk 1:43). Elizabeth knows who Mary is, and Who it is that is hidden within her. She welcomes Mary and she welcomes Jesus unreservedly because she truly understands who they are. (Is that not what real friendship is?) So this intimate scene is very much about finding that sense of belonging and trust and family that is so essential to being truly at home with someone.

3 – The Nativity – Searching for a Home

36315_all_21-02-BirthOfChrist — via lds.org

Joseph and Mary have to leave their home in Nazareth at a very difficult time. Mary is almost ready to give birth. To make matters worse, when they arrive in Bethlehem -which is supposed to be a sort of home, as is the city of David and the city of Joseph’s ancestry – they find that there is “no room for them at the inn.”

How often do we all feel like there is “no room” for us at our own homes?

And how often do we not make room for others? We are jealous of our space and of our time.

I think the immigrants to our own country, past and present, can find solace in the immigrant family of Nazareth – who, even after finding temporary shelter, had to flee to Egypt to escape the wrath of a political ruler.

I kept thinking how stressed out Joseph must have been. Most husbands are when their wives are about to give birth. And he must have been afraid that they would not be able to find a safe place to stay. God provides, of course, but according to tradition He provides them a stable or cave of some sort, which is hardly an ideal location for giving birth, even in ancient times.

I could really relate to this mystery. Searching and searching for a place to live and encountering so many “no’s” – too expensive, too far away, too suspicious of multiple women living in the same house… you name it.

I wonder if perhaps it was hard for Joseph to accept the makeshift home God provided them in Bethlehem. Maybe not – he was a saint and probably trusted God far more than I do – but still I wonder if he was frustrated by having only a manger for Jesus and the company of animals for Mary. And yet the image of the stable, popularized later by St. Francis, has become so important for us later Christians. Joseph and Mary may not have known, at the time, how providential it was for them to suffer this uncertainty and this homelessness, yet for generations afterward the image of them in the stable has been a way for so many people to approach Christ.

Pope Benedict says:

Christmas is an epiphany – the appearing of God and of his great light in a child that is born for us. Born in a stable in Bethlehem, not in the palaces of kings. In 1223, when Saint Francis of Assisi celebrated Christmas in Greccio with an ox and an ass and a manger full of hay, a new dimension of the mystery of Christmas came to light. Saint Francis of Assisi called Christmas “the feast of feasts” – above all other feasts – and he celebrated it with “unutterable devotion” (2 Celano 199; Fonti Francescane, 787). […] [T]hrough [Francis] and the character of his faith, something new took place: Francis discovered Jesus’ humanity in an entirely new depth. This human existence of God became most visible to him at the moment when God’s Son, born of the Virgin Mary, was wrapped in swaddling clothes and laid in a manger. (Pope Benedict, Christmas Eve 2011 Homily)

Christ’s homelessness makes God accessible to us, because deep down we know that we all are homeless. We are all wanderers in a strange land. None of us want to stay forever in our stables, our caves. We want, like the Prodigal Son, to go Home.

I think this post has gone on long enough, so I will finish writing about the fourth and fifth mysteries later.

Home, and Other Destinations

June 11, 2013

One of my favorite movies growing up, but one I have not seen in a long, long time, is “The Wizard of Oz.” Our version was taped from a TV special hosted by the wonderful Angela Lansbury (“Mrs. Potts,” for those of you who don’t know her) and was interrupted by long commercials from the ‘90’s for cars, soap, and McDonald’s (thus I’ve somehow always associated those things with the Emerald City, scarecrows, and munchkins).

Anyway – the line I have been thinking of so often lately, as I drove from Louisiana back to Massachusetts, stopping in Athens, Tennessee one night, Washington D.C. the next, and later flying back to Notre Dame, Indiana, and as I now look forward to moving to Colorado next year, is: “There’s no place like home … There’s no place like home.”

Home.

Since writing this post on Setting and World Making, I’ve been rather preoccupied with the concept of place and how it shapes us, just as setting affects plot in a story. This week I have been teaching setting to little middle school students (they are SO small!)–a simplified form of what I did with my big kids a few weeks ago. These incoming sixth graders were especially intrigued by how setting establishes what is possible and impossible. After using lots of adjectives to label various parts and objects of our classroom with sticky notes, we then made a chart discussing what COULD happen in our room (“we could have fun,” “we could learn,” “we could write”) and what COULD NOT happen (“we can’t have a circus–the elephants wouldn’t fit” “we can’t cook a pizza–there’s no pizza oven” “we can’t be underwater–we couldn’t breathe/the water would escape through the door and windows”).

And I thought about what is possible–and impossible–for me, being back here at Notre Dame for the summer. I can write a lot more. I can spend time with ACE friends. I can pray in the beautiful basilica, and run around the Saint Mary and Saint Joseph lakes. But I cannot be with my high school students. I cannot observe alligators slipping slyly into the Mississippi river. I cannot enjoy drive-through daiquiris (read about these unbelievable establishments here).

Reunited with other ACE teachers here at Notre Dame, I am able listen to new stories about their kids—spread all over the country—and the funny phrases, the accents, the struggles, the absurdities and delights of all the different places that have shaped them. “Do your kids say ‘swaggin’?” “Yes they do!” “I’ve never heard of ‘cuttin’ up’ before.” “Well, neither had I!” And I thought, my goodness, we have become a part of new settings and some of us have even found ourselves at “home” there.

Yet my decision to leave my ACE school and to move to a new place, to a new state–to uproot myself, as it were, for the third time in three years–has me feeling rather homeless lately. I haven’t lived in Massachusetts for more than a few weeks at a time since high school. As much as I would love to, I cannot become an undergraduate in Dallas again. And although I plan on visiting Louisiana next year, I will be doing just that: visiting. I will be a visitor, in someone else’s home.

My Dad told me about a new book by Rod Dreher called The Little Way of Ruthie Leming, reviewed here by Michael Hannon. It’s very much about home, one’s sense of place, community, and belonging. And, in our restless and mobile age, it seems also to be an appeal to us to re-evaluate our relationship with our homes, wherever they may be.

Hannon’s description has put this book at the very top of my reading list this summer: “The book tells two distinct stories, beautifully interwoven: an autobiography of Rod himself, and a hagiography of his sister Ruthie.” Rod is the restless one—who wants to leave his native Louisiana behind, to seek home elsewhere. Ruthie is the opposite—content to remain and to grow in her beloved little community:

An involuntary outsider from a young age, Rod never wanted anything more than escape. Philosophical by nature and restless by temperament, he annoyed his sister and the St. Francisville community at large with his constant curiosity, asking probing questions about ultimate realities that they were happier just to take for granted. Despite knowing that they loved him, he never felt understood by his family or accepted by their small-minded local community. Without disparaging the simple lives they led, he always longed for something somehow grander for himself.

Whereas Ruthie was born into the place she knew she belonged, Rod always felt like a stranger in their hometown. So after college, he left Louisiana in search of a place where he too could fit in, pursuing a career in journalism and wandering all over the Atlantic coast. But even there, from Washington to New York to Philadelphia, Rod never found the sense of at-homeness that Ruthie had always known in St. Francisville. (Michael Hannon, “Small-Town Saints for Our Placeless Age”)

As I read Hannon’s review (you should too), I found myself feeling a little sad, and even a little guilty. In a way, I’m like Rod–bouncing around the country, encountering new places, meeting new people–and always wanting in the back of my mind to find home. So many of the people I admire most, like my Grandma, my Mom, my Dad, my sister, Flannery O’Connor, Tolkien, Emily Dickinson, Richard Wilbur, all seem to have a very strong sense of place, of home. My Mom still has a strong attachment for Oklahoma where she grew up. My Dad, my Grandma, and my sister are New Englanders through-and-through. O’Connor, Tolkien, Dickinson, and Wilbur are great because their reverence for place helps all of us understand what home really means.

And yet strangely, in ACE, part of our job is to be displaced and a little homeless. And our foreign-ness is often a gift to our students, many of whom may never leave their home-state and may never experience, first-hand, the adventure of travel as we have. Sometimes over the past two years I found myself tempted to encourage my students to branch out too and to see new parts of the country, to apply to that reach-college out of state, to accept the adventure. And there is good in this. As Bilbo says to Frodo, “You step onto the road, and if you don’t keep your feet, there’s no knowing where you might be swept off to.”

Yet of course this is a warning as a well as an invitation.

watermarked2 — created by Shaylynn on her blog “Shealynn’s Faerie Shoppe”

There is that distinctly “progressive” tendency to despise insularity, to belittle the prejudices and notions of small-town America, to complain that some people refuse to widen their horizons and see the world in new ways. It is one of the many temptations of the ACE teacher, I think. And I think Bilbo’s warning should be considered. We may encourage our students to leave–but where are we encouraging them to go? Where are we hoping they will be “swept off to”? The journey is important in and of itself, but so is the destination.

I have been swept off to many strange and wonderful places in the past few years, but I am beginning to feel what Rod Dreher describes in his book, a longing for home. And so I recognize there is a wisdom in the people who choose to stay–to go to the local college, return for your high school reunions, live near your family, remain in your home-town. It is not the popular choice nowadays.

Having cut the ties that bind us geographically, we have become in many ways a placeless people. We have lost what St. Benedict called “stability,” man’s permanent attachment to a particular home in this life. “St. Benedict considered the kinds of monks who moved from place to place all the time to be the worst of all,” Dreher recounts. “They refused the discipline of place and community, and because of that, they could never know humility. Without humility, they could never be happy.”

For Rod, the realization of this Benedictine truth required him to go home: “[If] I wanted to know the inner peace and happiness in community that Ruthie had, I needed to practice a rule of stability. Accept the limitations of a place, in humility, and the joys that can also be found there may open themselves.”

[…]

“There has to be balance,” Rod reminds us. “Not everyone is meant to stay—or to stay away—forever. There are seasons in the lives of persons and of families. Our responsibility, both to ourselves and to each other, is to seek harmony within the limits of what we are given—and to give each other grace.” (Ibid)

O’Connor also insists upon seeking “harmony within the limits of what we are given.” We are all invited to some courageous act, and for some it is the task of staying, and for others it is the task of leaving and starting somewhere new. I think my fellow ACE teachers can relate. Some of them are staying at their schools. Some are leaving. Some, like me, will continue to be teachers. Others won’t. We all carry the gift and the burden of whatever setting we have been shaped by for the past two years, though.

I guess I am still looking for home. But I am grateful that over the years, different people have opened their homes to me.

“My Way Back Home” by Dawes: