Nostalgia for a Place Never Visited

Why we look for the elusive

[Programming note: As you know, this post continues our two-month-long series through the month of July on the topic of “desire” and “longing” in concert with my recent book on the topic. Next week, I will be taking a break from posting anything as my family will be on vacation. Posts will resume the week after. Thanks for the rest—and for reading!]

This week, one of my graduate students called to discuss a passage from one of my books they had been reading. In it, I cite a seemingly offhand remark from Eugene Peterson, in which he urges readers to resist the alluring trap of idealism, particularly concerning the church. “The church we want,” Peterson wrote, “becomes the enemy of the church we have.”¹ During our brief office hours visit, we delved into the ramifications and implications of Peterson’s statement, grappling with the challenge of learning to embrace the church, even when it falls short of our expectations.

As I talk to Christians from a variety of traditions and backgrounds, I find that many commonly experience a kind of nostalgia to return to some kind of church experience in the past. Sometimes, that nostalgia is connected to real places, experiences, and people; to those places where God first spoke to us, where we first felt God, where we first felt loved. Nostalgia can call to us from places we have actually been. But there remains another form of nostalgia that we often experience—a longing for a place, person, or experience we have never actually known or experienced. Often, when discussing one’s experience with church, it is as though we are seeking and desiring someplace that, oddly, we’ve never experienced. This is nostalgia for a place we’ve never visited. 

Photo by Joey kwok on Unsplash

Nostalgia is a powerful—and equally dangerous—emotion. I am always, it seems, wanting to go back to somewhere that never was. In fact, there is a danger in living a nostalgic life. “Do not say, ‘Why were the old days better than these?’, the author of Ecclesiastes warns, “For it is not wise to ask such questions.” (Eccl 7.10) More often than not, when we think about the past, we tend to think that they were ‘the good old days’ because they are old, safe in the past, free from meddling. But the reality remains that if we were to replay the tapes, we would quickly remember that they were not the ‘good’ days we think them to be. The old days were as hard as these days. They are just days that can’t be changed. So we see them as safe in the past. 

This is why remembering rightly is as important as it is to the God of the Bible. As seen, for example, in the Pentateuchal writings of Numbers and Deuteronomy. God constantly commands memory as an operative function of covenant faithfulness (e.g., Num 15.37-41 and Deut 5.15). Not only is memory commanded. Remembering rightly is core to Israel’s worship of Yahweh.² We see this memory fail, for example, in Numbers 20. There, once again, Israel complains to Moses that the food that they have in the desert is not as good as the food they had in Egypt. “Why did you bring us up out of Egypt to this terrible place?,” Israel asks, “It has no grain or figs, grapevines or pomegranates. And there is no water to drink!” (Num 20.5) They appear to be longing for the foods of their time of enslavement in Egypt. Yet, they are longing for something that never existed. Commentators often point out that the foods Israel appears to have nostalgia for—grain, figs, grapes, and pomegranates—are the very fruits and vegetables that ancient Jewish rabbis believed were the possible options for the fruit or vegetables that hung from the tree of life in the garden of Eden. 

What is going on, then? What Israel appears to be doing is reflecting on their time in Egyptian slavery as though it was like the peace and joy of Eden. This is a dangerous form of nostalgia. And this is why God is always commanding his people to remember rightly. For Israel, the divine injunctions to remember were directed at a covenant community that was constantly torn between a desire to either retreat to the false foods of Egypt or entirely forget what God had accomplished in their liberation. Israel always seems to oscillate between nostalgia (worshiping the past) and amnesia (forgetting the past). Which is a problem. Israel was to be something akin to what sociologist Robert Bellah once called a “community of memory”—a community that inhabited and reconstituted the stories of God’s faithfulness for future generations.³ This was threatened by nostalgia and amnesia. You can’t pass on history that has been twisted. 

This is a unique part of the human story: we are homesick for some home we seem to have never been to. 

For the Christian, this homesickness isn’t a happenstance or some glitch in evolutionary history. We were created for another world. In his Lost in the Cosmos, Christian thinker Walker Percy observes how even after seemingly endless technological advances making human existence more manageable and comfortable, we, ironically, increasingly feel like foreigners on Earth.⁴ Others, like Ronald Rolheiser, have called this unsatiated longing for some other world our “fundamental dis-ease.”⁵ C.S. Lewis even considered this homesickness evidence for God’s existence, writing, 

If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.⁶ 

While I’ve reflected on this idea for some time, a new friend introduced me to a Welsh word for this. Hiraeth—pronounced “Here-a-eth.” This has been defined by one writer as:

a nostalgic longing for home, but it’s a little more elusive than that. It’s also a longing for a time, place, or person that feels like home but may no longer exist or that never existed at all.⁷

It was actually this experience that appears to have aroused C.S. Lewis to faith in his post-college years. Why, he wondered, could he be an atheist who gave as much energy, time, and thought to the idea of God? Life was consumed with thoughts about someone that he believed did not exist. Though he didn’t believe, his non-belief occupied almost all of his thought. Later on, he would attribute this experience of longing for something he didn’t seem to have as the pathway to faith. 

Humans are longing creatures who spend their lives seeking something—something that they very often have never had. This deserves even more nuance. I think there may be two kinds of Hiraeth. There is a false Hiraeth which has nostalgia for something we’ve never experienced and does not exist. But there is also true Hiraeth which is a nostalgia for something we’ve never experienced and does exist. The second, I believe, is why Christians are as occupied with heaven as they are. Humans were not created in heaven and returned to heaven. In fact, we were made for Earth. But we long for heaven—a place we will be. That is an example of a true Hiraeth. Heaven is that place we long for that we have yet to be at. We live longing for something we almost seem to know but have yet to experience. 

This is the kind of nostalgia that propelled my graduate student to call me this week. She is longing, hoping, seeking a community of people around Christ in church that she’s never seemed to experience. This longing, she would admit, is what fuels her love for the church. She seeks the church because she knows what it could be. And she wants to be a part of it. 

Be free, friend, to dream of a church you’ve never seen. Dream of heaven even if you’ve never yet walked its streets. Desire a relationship with God that you long to experience. But keep in mind that something—daresay Someone—has put these dreams and longings in your heart. Why would it be that we would be so thirsty, Lewis would seem to wonder, if there were no such thing as water? What if those nostalgic feelings you often have are divine insertions into your life to desire the eternal life your soul was made to enjoy?

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Thanks for reading my work. As always, you can always find me wasting time on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook. Or you can listen to my podcast, Slow Theology. If you found this content helpful to your journey, yay! Consider enjoying my most recent book The Gift of Thorns: Jesus, the Flesh, and the War for our Wants, which was released with Zondervan in February of 2024. Within, I explore the topic of human desire from the perspective of Scripture, theology, and experience—with particular interest to how we can be formed into the image of Christ through our desires. In short, it’s about why our cultural mandate to “you do you” is so profoundly unhelpful to the follower of Jesus. You can support my work by reading it! And sharing about your experience. Click on the image below to get yourself a copy.

1. Eugene Peterson, Practice Resurrection: A Conversation on Growing up in Christ (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2010), 29.

2. I borrow this phrase from the subtitle of Miroslav Volf, The End of Memory: Remembering Rightly in a Violent World (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2021).

3. Robert N. Bellah et al., Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life, 1st ed. (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1985), 153.

4. Walker Percy, Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book (New York, NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1983).

5. Ronald Rolheiser, The Holy Longing: The Search for a Christian Spirituality, chap. 1.

6. C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (New York, NY: Scribner, 1952), 106.

7. This Welsh concept was introduced to me by a new friend at the WTC School of Theology—with whom I will be having a podcast episode released shortly. Thanks Mike Innis not only for the reference, but the really fun conversation about my recent book on desire.