I Told Myself It Was Only Nostalgia

He misses it and he has decided that the missing does not count as evidence.

Here is what he does with it, and he does it with real skill, because he is a clever man and he has had years to practice.

When the ache comes, and it comes about once a fortnight, usually on a Sunday morning around ten, he explains it.

He says: that is not God, that is my mother's kitchen. That is the smell of a particular building. That is being twenty-two and having somewhere to be. That is missing the person I was when I still had all my certainties.

And every one of those explanations is at least partly true, which is what makes them so effective.

So he files the ache under nostalgia and gets on with his morning.

He has been doing this for fourteen years. Somewhere between six and eight hundred times, he has had a genuine longing and immediately discredited the witness.

He is fifty-one, and if you asked him whether he misses it he would say no, and he would not be lying, because he genuinely no longer hears it as missing anything.

So let me ask you.

What if the missing is not sentiment but a fact about you?

He puts the memory in the psalm

Psalm 42 is written by somebody who is a long way from where he used to be, and in the middle of it he does something a modern man would be embarrassed to do.

He remembers, in detail, and he writes the memory down as part of the argument rather than as a weakness in it.

These things I remember as I pour out my soul: how I used to go to the house of God under the protection of the Mighty One with shouts of joy and praise among the festive throng.Psalm 42:4

How I used to go.

He is not scolding himself for looking back and he is not diagnosing the memory. He is reporting it, in the middle of a psalm, as one of the things that is true about his situation.

Psalm 42 treats the memory of a practice as evidence about the psalmist's present condition rather than as sentiment to be discounted, and the Spirit who gave that psalm let the looking back stand as part of the record, so the ache you have been explaining away for fourteen years has never once been inadmissible.

Now, plainly, because you are clever and clever men need to be met at the level they are actually operating at.

Your explanations are good. Genuinely. It probably is partly your mother's kitchen and it probably is partly being twenty-two.

But notice what you have done with a piece of information. You found a partial explanation and treated it as a complete dismissal, and those are two very different operations, and you have been performing the second one while believing you performed the first.

Psalm 42 has a man pouring out his soul while remembering how he used to go, and the Spirit put both the pouring and the remembering in the same verse, which means eight hundred discredited longings have been eight hundred pieces of evidence about you that never got entered.

And there is something about the ache that your explanation cannot account for, and you know it, which is why it comes back.

Nostalgia fades. It is a warm feeling about a thing that is over and it gets weaker with time, the way a photograph does.

Fourteen years in, yours has not weakened.

Psalm 42 has the same thirst running through the whole psalm rather than fading out of it, and the Spirit was in that persistence, so a longing that has not diminished in fourteen years has never once behaved like nostalgia.