Nostalgia is a yearning for authenticity, for a time when things were simpler, more real;

The Japanese have a word “懐かしい” (“natsukashii”) which is said when one experiences something that is reminiscent of a fond past experience. — my definition is better than the one I just linked “missed”, “yearned”. I think that when an experience triggers parts of the brain that bring up echoes and clouds of past experiences, the hallucination gives us a sense of revelry. Good brains forget pain much faster than then forget happiness and thus reveling in these pasts can be inaccurately pleasant.

Perhaps that is why the accusation of ideal is somewhat on target. But in a Zen way, if one just observes the feelings and does not long, yearn or idealize them, the experience remains natsukashii and does not become nostalgia.

[thanks for making me think about this - natsukashii!]

“Will you be persuaded that this has really happened if said charismatic people don’t make a big name for themselves–if this happens not in a large, visible way in Society but in small, hardly-noticed interactions among people who don’t necessarily write for influential blogs?”

Absolutely. Not everyone is a Shane Claiborne. The overwhelming majority of congregations and communities operate on this level I only mean that it will still take people who have, shall we say colorfully, enough ‘balls’ to take the initiative. I would call this ‘charismatic’ in a Holy Spirit kind of way more so than a magnetic personality kind of way.

Aha! That paragraph goes on the refrigerator.

It is my feeling that if there were a few charismatic people who were able to focus their will and persuade others to join them in new creative ventures in community and the arts then we could potentially have another “Arts and Crafts” or “Pre-Raphaelite” movement.

But here’s the problem. Will you be persuaded that this has really happened if said charismatic people don’t make a big name for themselves–if this happens not in a large, visible way in Society but in small, hardly-noticed interactions among people who don’t necessarily write for influential blogs?

People like Berry and Millbank and the New Monastics, though, are not naive in the least. They know exactly what’s going on in the world, they simply have enough faith and imagination to believe that (to quote the Abbot of the New Monastics) “another world is possible, another world is already here.”

I think that nostalgia, faith and imagination are all linked, but I’d like to touch on that in another post.

As to your point concerning wealth being our opiate, I also like the image you conjured in a previous post about original sin being the systems of this world that we are born into and have a very difficult time escaping. Our wealth driven culture is one of those systems of institutional sin that holds us in cycles of personal sin, and keeps us from achieving our full potential as citizens of God’s Kingdom.

There is so much evil in the world, but there are everywhere and every place little out-breakings of the Kingdom, signs and wonders pointing the glorious future in Christ.

Many theologians I read are often accused of ‘nostalgia’ because they repudiate ‘modernist’ epistemological assumptions. Always I hear that Milbank is just searching to renew a ‘pre-modern’ or ‘pre-critical’ era of reflection.

I’m sure you’ve heard the same things about Wendell Berry as I have. Berry just needs to understand, they say, that he is looking back to a nostalgic past that can never be again. Industrialized and de-personalized manufacturing of food is the way it is and anything else, any alternative voice, is backwards and just doesn’t get it.

This list could go on to include indie music and the revival of folk, bluegrass and rock & roll. And other things besides.

But could it not be that we feel that we’ve caught a glimpse of truths that are being twisted, or repressed, or marketed and sold (and so cheapened and deauthenticized) or which are lost beneath a technologized and individualized culture?

The problem is that our wealth is the opiate of the people. We catch glimpses of truths in the writings of certain people or in the art of others and we want that truth to be more pronounced and to guide us in more fundamental ways; but our moral will isn’t strong enough so long as our lives are ‘comfortable’ and our desires met.

It is my feeling that if there were a few charismatic people who were able to focus their will and persuade others to join them in new creative ventures in community and the arts then we could potentially have another “Arts and Crafts” or “Pre-Raphaelite” movement.

People like Sufjan Stevens are already doing this is music and I see no reason that it couldn’t spread to other cultural and ecclesial sites. As an example I think the “New Monastic” movement is a sign of this kind of thing.

I’m probably only rambling at this point. Do you get what I’m saying? Are you feeling it?