Nostalgia is universal. Rumors abound that it afflicted even the likes of Stalin and Hitler. The term is generally defined as a sentimental yearning for some irretrievable experience or condition, such as bouncing playfully on the knee of our long-deceased grandfather, or singing bawdy ballads in the old fraternity bar, or going home again.
There is another emotion that is often confused with nostalgia but represents something really quite different, more profound and more spiritual. It is the experience of longing. The French have only the word “nostalgie,” or possibly “désir,” to cover this entire range of feelings. The Germans, on the other hand, can speak of “Sehnsucht.” This calls up images of a passionate quest, grounded in an insatiable desire, an ardent yearning for something or someone out of reach yet tantalizingly near. As a verb, it’s reflexive. “Ich sehne mich nach ihr,” a young German boy pines, dreaming longingly of his beloved. In other languages, too, there are special terms, both verbs and nouns, that express this unique and deep longing for a desired person, the reliving of a precious memory, or the fulfillment of a distant hope.
Longing is more than a psychological condition or an emotional response to some stimulus from our past or future. It is a profoundly spiritual state that finds its closest analogy in the realm of sexual experience. Yet it transcends the purely sexual as much and as fully as hope transcends despair or life transcends death.
In the Church’s ascetic tradition, such longing is expressed as erôs, an intense desire or aspiration that moves the soul toward communion with the God of love. It commonly involves an element of “ecstasy,” in which one’s very being is transcended to the point that, like the apostle Paul, a person in prayer knows not whether they are “in the body or out of the body,” a question to which only God knows the answer (2 Cor 12).
More frequently, authentic longing is experienced as what Greek tradition calls charmolupê, “bright sadness” or “sorrowful joy.” In the seventh step of his “Ladder of Divine Ascent,” St John of Sinai (+ c. 650) describes this condition as a “mourning that leads to joy.” There he says (in Fr Lazarus Moore’s translation):
Mourning, according to God, is sadness of soul, and the disposition of a sorrowing heart, which ever madly seeks that for which it thirsts; and when it fails in its quest, it painfully pursues it, and follows in its wake grievously lamenting. Or thus: mourning is a golden spur in a soul which is stripped of all attachment and of all ties, fixed by holy sorrow to watch over the heart…
Keep a firm hold of the blessed joy-grief (charmolupê) of holy compunction, and do not stop working at it until it raises you high above the things of this world and presents you pure to Christ.
Most of us, at one time or another, have been given a taste of this kind of longing. We enter one year, for example, as a gift of pure grace, into an especially intense reliving of the events of Holy Week. Immersed in the beauty of the liturgical services, our worship takes on a richness and depth we otherwise rarely know. We become truly conscious of our sinful state: attitudes and actions that drive us away from the mercy and love of our compassionate Father. That drive us away, too, from others whom we love. Yet that love, as we so bitterly know, quickly fades before concerns and preoccupations that lead us to focus almost exclusively upon ourselves. Compunction seizes our heart and conveys a crushing sense of loss: loss of loved-ones, loss of purpose, loss of God. And in the midst of a service that is achingly beautiful, we weep. We grieve the losses, the terrible losses, which we have brought upon ourselves, and those that have simply happened for reasons beyond our understanding.
It seems to be God’s will, nevertheless, that those tears be accompanied by a quiet inner joy. Mourning truly does lead to joy, insofar as compunction leads to repentance, a turning again from the Old Adam to the New, from the emptiness of self to the plêrôma, the divine fullness of Christ.
Yet that joy inevitably retains an element of sadness. In this life, holy erôs is never pure desire. It is always tempered by the realization that the object of our deepest longing remains beyond our grasp. And for this, curiously but emphatically, we give thanks. For it is precisely the inaccessibility of what we long for that makes the longing so intense, the experience of grief so poignant, and the desire for repentance—for a thoroughgoing return—so genuine. This is what produces the paradoxical mingling of sadness and joy, compunction and ecstasy. The two must be held together and experienced as a single motivating impulse that takes us beyond ourselves, our self-centered values and priorities, and directs our mind and heart toward the Other, whose love we long to know beyond all else.
God calls us not only to life, but to joy. Longing is the heart-rending emotion that tells us that such joy will never be ours until God Himself grants the petition, “Thy Kingdom come!” In the meantime, we wait, we pray and we hope. With St Augustine, we remind ourselves that “our hearts are restless until they find their rest in Thee.” And we beg God without ceasing to preserve within us the flame of longing: the passionate, ardent yearning to step beyond this world, and to enter at last into all the beauty and all the joy of the world to come.