In the style of Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg’s Life Is a Sacred Text Substack, I’ll be diving more deeply into the topic of the week - sometimes with more resources, sometimes with more that didn’t quite fit into the free post, sometimes with questions that I have or that you have.
These Thursday posts will be for paid subscribers only, but I wanted to give you all a chance to see what might be up here, so today it’s available to everyone.
Shortly after posting Nostalgia Kills Progress on Facebook, the Reverend Christian Schmidt commented “I'm also interested in the relationship between tradition and nostalgia. I think there's important stuff there for us to sort out.”
I am actually not terribly surprised that he asked that question, as last summer Christian asked me to preach a sermon that tells the congregation he’s serving that the future means letting go - not forgetting - but letting go of the past. I did so in a piece called “Plastic on the Furniture,” and while some folks understood I was talking about traditions and beliefs that no longer serve us, all of the conversation in coffee hour was about how I sorted physical stuff.
Sigh.
So let’s take another run at it.
In a post at First Things (from the Institute on Religion and Public Life), Dr. Leroy Huizenga writes this:
I’ve been teaching Flannery O’Connor in an online course, The Catholic Imagination , and in her gruesome story “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” the characters of the grandmother, Red Sammy, and the Misfit indulge in nostalgia, the belief that the past was better than the present. For instance, the grandmother says, “In my time . . . children were more respectful of their native states and their parents and everything else. People did right then.” Red Sammy says, “A good man is hard to find . . . Everything is getting terrible. I remember the day you could go off and leave your screen door unlatched. Not no more.” The Misfit remembers fondly his father’s words and deeds.
This nostalgia is not healthy; it keeps the characters constrained in their inauthentic ways, as they believe the present is a time when virtue and transformation is simply too difficult.
Huizenga goes on (translate from the Roman Catholic as necessary):
Nostalgia is a sin, a form of sloth, and engaging in it enervates discipleship and devotion. But tradition is different; tradition is not the dead faith of the living but rather the living faith of the dead, as Pelikan said. To live within and out of tradition is not to daydream about days gone by most of us never experienced anyway, but rather to ride the crest of the wave of God’s redemptive story as we live out our own stories within its broader plot.
I think he’s on to something here - and I wonder whether nostalgia is in a sense lazy? It certainly isn’t an active forward direction.
Lots of questions and connections arise for me, and I’d love to engage them with you:
Do you think Huizenga’s definition makes sense for Unitarian Universalists? What might be missing?
How do we help our congregations understand the difference? Do we need rituals?
What’s the difference for us between tradition and “the living tradition”? Is this what Theodore Parker was getting at with his 19th century sermon “The Transient and the Permanent in Christianity”?
What other thoughts or questions do you have? Let’s engage!
Really enjoyed your "Plastic on the Furniture" sermon linked here, Kimberley. Especially the discussion of needing to let go of things, traditions, people that are no longer serving us well. You ask such a key question: "What are we sacrificing in order to preserve this thing?" I wish we could all take a deep dive into this idea of opportunity cost. Because by holding onto a specific thing/person/tradition year after year, we are missing out on the benefits that could accrue to us from adopting a different approach, or finding different leaders, or working to shift our culture toward new more healthy ways, etc. I'm not thinking so much here about my UU congregation, but another nonprofit where I'm a board member that is simply paralyzed by it's traditions.