Theological Journal – July 20 Our Nostalgia Is Spiritually Dangerous
Why we shouldn’t worship the golden calf of the ‘pre-COVID’ days. Jeremy Sabella writing in Christianity Today ( https://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2020/july-web-only/sabella-nostalgia-spiritually-dangerous-covid-golden-calf.html ) offer some wise counsel for living through these times. Nostalgia is the danger he is worried about. The longing for normality, connection, and meaning we have lost due to Covid-19 can, he writes, ”dredge up unresolved loss in ways that tempt us to recreate a sanitized, distorted version of the past. Wistful longing for a simpler time comes easily during this dysfunctional present. But left unchecked, that nostalgia can lead us alarmingly astray.” It didn’t take long, after all, for the newly liberated Israelites, to betray their Liberator (divine and human), and long for the that normality, connection, and meaning that enslavement in Egypt had given them. When Moses when up the mountain to receive the tablets of the law from YHWH and was gon...