Musings on Nostalgia at Furnace Fest

By Fr. Christopher Foley

 

I have just returned from a beautiful weekend playing music with my dear friends after a 20-year hiatus of performing live. I had a blast. I got to see old friends, make new ones, and revel in the energy of a shared experience. I am so full of gratitude for being able to do so. It is a beautiful thing to be with so many like-minded people who share a love of music. Many who were there were so shaped and formed by this sub-culture and made them into the people they are today, including me. There was definitely a sense of nostalgia that everyone at this music festival (Furnace Fest) experienced. It has caused me to ponder about this sense of nostalgia.

The word nostalgia comes from two Greek words – nostos meaning “homecoming” and alga meaning “pain.” It was penned in the 15th century to describe a medical ailment of soldiers fighting away from their homeland who struggled with profound homesickness. Eventually, this medical understanding gave way to a more poetic understanding of the pain and longing for something far away or in the past. It can be both a sadness and a joy.

After spending a weekend away filled with loud music, friends, music fans, and community, I have been contemplating what this nostalgia consists of. We all long to connect, to participate in something bigger than ourselves. We find that living in the present moment can sometimes be a struggle and we find that we long for a “past” where things were much simpler or when we were connected to others that we have lost touch with. This has proven particularly difficult during the last year and a half with a pandemic that has isolated us from one another.

Connecting with people around a music “scene” last weekend proved to be an experience of joy. A joy, not in a religious sense, though one could argue that it is, but a joy of connecting with other people who share a common vision and outlook – a community of like-minded individuals who have grown and matured but are from the same “homeland” so to speak. There is a nostalgia for a “far country” that we have left long ago.

Now, as someone who longs for these simpler times and was raised in this music “scene,” I found the weekend both joyful and sad, much like the true meaning of nostalgia. Joy in an emotional sense is like the joy one feels at finally letting out the grief of loss and reconnecting to what has died in a new way. I found myself overwhelmed with emotion at times while playing music and visiting with old friends. The joy of re-connecting with the old self, but now in a new way, more mature and full of life experience. But also a sadness, a sorrow of lost connection, and the realization that one can never really go back. The old country has changed and though we can artificially recreate something for a weekend or a little longer, we are confronted with the reality that the journey must continue and we are only tourists now. We will eventually have to return to the present. This begins to give way to something new and profound. The nostalgia begins to integrate us and we find that we can face our “new land” with new vigor and joy. A happy return to the present that contains the whole story and brings with it contentment with the present while still containing the story of the past within it.

As a Christian and a priest, I can’t help but connect this to the longing that Israel has for Jerusalem during their Babylonian captivity. The Psalmist recounts weeping by the waters of Babylon remembering Zion. “How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?” We connect this, in our Christian tradition to the nostalgia for Paradise. The pain of being in exile from our true home in the Kingdom. We long to come home to the house of the father after wasting our life in prodigal living. It is my belief that all nostalgia is ultimately a desire to return to our true home, into the loving arms of our Lord. A return to the Gates of Paradise. This nostalgia includes the painful discovery that all longing, all yearning, all desire is to be found in this true integration of all life as life in Christ. I think this is why a weekend like I experienced this past weekend has the possibility, in some sort of beautiful way, to be a step in this journey home – a taste of Paradise and a reminder that, as beautiful as it is, it is only an icon, or window into what my heart ultimately longs for, which is partaking of Beauty itself, true communion with our Creator.

 

Fr. Christopher Foley is the bass player for the band Luxury, and is an Orthodox priest. You can see, and hear, their amazing story in the film Parallel Love: The Story of a Band Called Luxury. This article was originally created as a Facebook post and Fr. Christopher graciously agreed to allow us to re-post it here.