I have to confess to a slightly geeky fascination with the
origins of words. For some reason I was thinking about the word ‘nostalgia’ recently
and wondering where it came from. We use it to mean a cosy sort of sentimental
wistfulness – mulling over the ‘good old days’. As a doctor , however, I suspected that the
word had a more negative meaning originally because ‘-algia’ is an ending that crops up lots of medical
terms, where it means ‘pain’.
The pain
of old memories perhaps? I knew that for
many bereaved people, memories of happy times can be a bittersweet thing,
sometimes serving only to accentuate the pain of their loss. But no, that was not the meaning. Actually nostos means ‘homecoming’, so nostalgia is the pain of longing to
return home. Apparently soldiers were thought to suffer with nostalgia when serving a long way from
their native land. Anyone who has been detained away from home for any
length of time knows a little of what this means. For many of us, the place of
our birth exerts a strong pull on us that is difficult to put into words. Other
places may be more pleasant or attractive but there is ‘no place like home’.
Familiarity, pride, history and posterity are all tied up in it. It is sense of
belonging – both of knowing and of being known.
For me it is the feeling I have when I have been away and drive
back into Yorkshire over the Pennines. I’m back in a landscape that has been
part of my consciousness since my earliest years. I’m back with people whose
ways and habits I understand and who talk like me. Quite simply, Yorkshire is
where I belong and always will. The Welsh have a word, hiraeth, for this feeling which does not have a counterpart in
English. It expresses that mysterious pull back to the homeland or the land of
our ancestors. For Welsh folk, it seems to take on almost a mystical quality and
occurs frequently in their poetry and song.
Why am I telling you all this? Because, following on from my
last post, Christians are people detained for a season far from their home. We
long to be in our heavenly home. The degree to which we feel this nostalgia or hiraeth makes a good measure of our spiritual health. How much do
we long for and anticipate Jesus’ second coming? Is the longing so intense that
at times it is painful? Or is heaven something that seems distant and that we
forget about some of the time?
At the funeral of a lady I knew, the congregations were told
how she lived in daily expectation of the Lord’s return. Not that she did not get
on with living a useful life in the meantime – far from it – but she loved her
Lord so much, and walked so closely with him, that she lived in constant
readiness for that day. This is how the Apostle Paul describes his own desire
when writing to his Philippian flock:
‘I am torn between the two: I desire to depart and be with Christ,
which is better by far, but it is more necessary for you that I remain in the
body.’ (Philippians 1:23-24)
All too often our desires do not resemble Paul’s; we have
allowed our hearts and minds to become preoccupied with the things of this
world and have lost our first love. What treatment did our Lord Jesus recommend
to the church in Ephesus, which had ‘forsaken its first love’? (Revelation
2:1-7) He called them to stop and look up at the height from which they had
fallen. In other words, go back and consider why it was that we loved the Lord so much in the first place. Remind
ourselves of all that he has done for us. Meditate again on the character
of God. Kick out anything that has usurped God as King of our hearts. Confess
our cold-heartedness to him and seek his Spirit afresh to revive the fires of
love for the Lord Jesus Christ. Then we will begin to long for our spiritual
home as we should, and that passion will breathe new life into our service for
him.
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