“They must make the noise they can, because if they cease for a moment, we hear the calls of sanity and sweetness again…”.

A while back I wrote a review of Anthony Esolen’s fine book NostalgiaHERE

In it, I wrote:

How often is the charge of “nostalgia” flung as a cliché into the teeth of those who desire, with their legitimate aspirations, the liturgical forms of their forebears?

Nostalgia, however, is, as the Greek indicates, a pain (algea) we feel for our “return home” (nostron): “pain for the return, ache for the homecoming.”  It is an essential longing.

Today I saw this tweet… which has the proper definition of nostalgia.

Going back to my entry about Esolen’s book, I also wrote:

[…]

With every page, I cannot help but find a parallel with the devastation to our Catholic identity caused over the last decades, especially through devastation of our sacred liturgical worship.   We are our rites.  Change and tinker and make “progress with our rites” and you alter our identity as Catholics.  The damage has been nearly catastrophic.

[…]

Those technocrats, for the sake of progress, damaged not something that was technically perfect, every bit accounted for somehow and having a utilitarian purpose to justify its continuance in our rites. They damaged our place, our home, our patria, where we start from and toward which we tend.

No wonder we are so damn screwed up as a Church.

[…]

Many of you have been misunderstood and mistreated for your desire to go home, to be a Roman in the Roman thing, your rite, your patria which you ache for because it is yours.  I sure have my stripes to show for it and the long tracks of my tears.

Time after time I have spoken with people, especially with priests, who at some point woke up from Calypso’s arms, who opened their eyes within the pigsty far from home, and realized that they had both squandered the patrimony they had or had been cheated out of the patrimony they didn’t know that they ought to have been given.

In his introduction, Esolen ends one section with the reaction of the progressive to those who feel deeply their sense of belonging, their desire to be placed and rooted.

“[P]eople who object to nostalgia are afraid that their achievements, such as they are, will not stand scrutiny.  “No, you don’t want to go home!” they cry.  They must cry, they must make the noise they can, because if they cease for a moment, we hear the calls of sanity and sweetness again, and we may just shake our heads as if awaking from bad and feverish dream.  Coming to ourselves, we may resolve, like the prodigal, to “arise and go to my father’s house.”

 

Nostalgia: Going Home in a Homeless World by Anthony Esolen

US HERE – UK HERE

 

About Fr. John Zuhlsdorf

Fr. Z is the guy who runs this blog. o{]:¬)
This entry was posted in Linking Back, Our Catholic Identity, Pò sì jiù, The future and our choices and tagged , . Bookmark the permalink.

3 Comments

  1. Pingback: FRIDAY AFTERNOON EDITION | BIG PULPIT

  2. grateful says:

    Thank You.

  3. Sandy says:

    I can’t believe the “carousel scene” brought tears to my eyes. It must touch something deep in many of us, considering the world today!

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