Autumn Nostalgia

Today felt like autumn here in Duluth. It was rainy and temperatures struggled to get into the low 60s. Autumn often brings with it nostalgic feelings. School begins in the fall, and I love learning. I spent twenty-seven of my fifty-one years preparing for school in one form or another in the fall of the year.
I have been thinking about my childhood as I read Josh Wilker’s memoir Cardboard Gods. Wilker tells his story with the aid of baseball cards from his childhood collection (I collected baseball cards and tonight before their game the Twins introduced the top fifty Twins from their fifty years ). I have also been thinking about my childhood this week as I have been preparing to officiate at the funeral of a young woman (forty-six) who grew up in the same neighborhood as I did. Meeting with her family has brought back a number of memories.
In his book, Wilker writes the following: You can’t be a child forever. You have to slice that part of yourself away and put on a uniform of some sort, whether it’s official or unofficial, and punch that clock. Is there a way to do this and still hang on to a wider sense of the world?
Wilker poses a great question. Can we hang on to a wider sense of the world? Can we retain some of the sense of wonder that we have as children? Can we keep something of what seems an almost innate sense of compassion in children?
Perhaps one way we carry with us some of the positive qualities of childhood is to nurture a healthy nostalgia. By a healthy nostalgia I mean revisiting the past not to hold it up as an ideal now unachievable, but to cultivate some of the important feelings, attitudes and moral sentiments that may have been present. Such healthy nostalgia can come with a wistfulness and sense of loss, but those should not overshadow the cultivation of moral sentiments.
I think there may be something here. Didn’t Jesus encourage the cultivation of certain aspects of childhood?
Not long ago, I encountered another literary exploration of the past, one set in autumn. The sense of loss is palpable. Nevertheless it permitted me to think about my past in a different way - another aid to a healthy nostalgia.
Now I peek into windows and open doors and do not find that air of permission. It has fled the world. Girls walk by me carrying their invisible bouquets from fields still steeped in grace, and I look up in the manner of one who follows with his eyes the passage of a hearse, and remembers what pierces him. John Updike, “In Football Season”

With Faith and With Feathers,

David