Cybercolumn by John Duncan: Unpacking memory, nostalgia and emotion

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Posted: 11/10/07

CYBER COLUMN:
Unpacking memory, nostalgia and emotion

By John Duncan

I’m sitting here under the old oak tree, thinking about unpacking boxes. The process of moving, transition and change creates memory, nostalgia and emotion. As I unpack boxes, the memory, nostalgia, and emotion form tributaries in my mind that flow in to the river of change.

First, I think of the memory that moving creates. As I unloaded boxes in our new home in our new town, I stumbled onto a box of baseball trophies. When did I ever play for the Dodgers? I remember the Jets, not New York and the Joe Namath of yesterday, but the pee-wee football Jets with red and white jerseys. I remember the spring days of playing baseball in fields of green with bees buzzing, back when I was an expert bunter because I could not hit a fast ball from the pitcher. A box of trophies takes up space in a box—the basketball, the football, and the baseball ones, all shiny and dusty and a few with broken pieces, incomplete like a bird with a broken wing. My trophies, they fill a box soon to be stashed in the attic.

John Duncan

Second, I recall the nostalgia that moving stirs up. How many pictures have I rediscovered in the process of moving? Wedding pictures and pictures of my daughters and pictures of places like Hawaii and England and North Carolina and pictures from home and church where people smile around tables stacked with food from pot luck dinners? Do churches still have pot luck dinners?

One picture stands tall, a chalk sketch of me and a first grader named Brock standing in front of Lakeside Baptist Church in Granbury, where once upon a time, I served as pastor. The church lay tilted in shades of orange and cream, with Brock and me standing in front of the stained glass in the shadow of the cross, both of us wearing huge smiles, smiling like we were licking our chops while waiting for ice cream at the counter or like we had just seen Jesus riding by on a donkey on Palm Sunday. Come to think of it, standing in the shadow of the cross is not a bad place to stand. Oswald Chambers agrees, “The underlying foundation of the Christian faith is the undeserved, limitless miracle of the love of God that was exhibited on the Cross of Calvary; a love that is not earned and can never be.” When I think of Brock and me standing under the stained-glass cross, I can only imagine God’s love shining on us like the reflection of stained glass behind a lighted window.

Third, I feel the emotion. Moving by itself is an overwhelming thing. I mean, did our attic hold that much stuff? Do we really need a dozen boxes of stuffed animals and Beanie Babies? And really, does any dear soul place pictures in boxes for future reference in this sophisticated digitized age where people send pictures over waves and wires a where they arrive via the Internet on computer screens? Family pictures and fun pictures like the time you went to Alaska and climbed a glacier and pictures like the first time you rode your bicycle and had no teeth and the pictures when your hair looked bad and pictures of houses with snow flakes in the winter and pictures that make you cry because you remember your deceased grandmother or maybe when life was simple and the digitized world had not taken over and there was no such a thing as a computer or e-mail. Emotion tumbles slowly, like a small rock rolling down a mountainside until it stops when it hits something like, maybe, that ridge in your heart.

Emotion tumbled in my own life in all this moving. My Aunt Mildred died. Right smack dab in the middle of moving, life took an expected but unexpected turn. Expected because she had been in a nursing home for four years; unexpected because, quite frankly, even though she was 83, I thought she had more time on this earth. My aunt Mildred lived in the mountains of North Carolina. She never married, lived most of her life in the same house and rarely ventured off of the mountain. Life for her was simple things—laughter at the table amid the passing of biscuits, gravy, green beans and chocolate pie; trips around the mountain on the Blue Ridge Parkway, where often we stopped at a place called Little Switzerland for ice cream; washing clothes in an old-fashioned crank-style machine and hanging them to dry in the sunshine and wind; watching the leaves change an array of colors in autumn; going to get your hair fixed on Friday and catching up on the local news; sitting on the front porch swing and watching fireflies blink in the cool of the evening as the sun set; planting and watering flowers while observing their growth; and attending the red-bricked Pine Branch Baptist Church and singing to the Lord “Amazing Grace” with the gathered saints each Sunday. “These are my people,” so sounds a lyric in a country song. Or as the poet Langston Hughes says, “Beautiful, also, are the souls of my people.” Mildred was a simple person who loved simple things in a simple place. And might I add, she possessed a beautiful soul, for beautiful are the souls of my people.

Memory, nostalgia and emotion form a river that runs deep into my own soul as I unpack boxes. But there are in those boxes tons of trivia and treasures, of junk and stuff. The Apostle Paul, earth wanderer that he was, sojourner who knew how to sew a tent and pack a tent on his missionary travels, referred to stuff as dung: “Yet, indeed, I count all things loss for the excellency of the knowledge of Christ Jesus my Lord, for whom I have suffered the loss of all things, and count them as dung that I may gain Christ.” Even Jesus used the word “dung.” He told the parable of a farmer who planted a fig tree in his vineyard and found no fruit. The farmer said to the keeper of his vineyard, “What in the world am I finding no figs on this tree?” (my paraphrase). The keeper of the vineyard said, “Leave it alone for a year until I dig around it (to give it air) and dung it (to fertilize it).” So dung, in essence, is rubbish or refuse or trash, or manure or fertilizer like the kind that turns your yard green when sprinkled in spring.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer adds wisdom, “Earthly possessions dazzle our eyes and delude us into thinking that they can provide security and freedom from anxiety. Yet all the time they are the very source of anxiety.” Bonheoffer is so right. Do you think he wrote that after unpacking boxes?

So, here I am under this old oak tree, thinking and unpacking boxes. I have found memory, nostalgia and emotion. I have unpacked trash and treasures, junk and stuff, stuff for shelves to behold and some stuff good for nothing more than for making fertilizer to spread on my yard. I have remembered the past, yet anticipate the future because you cannot live in the past. I have reached for the excellency of Christ and yearned for spiritual fruit on my limbs like mouth-watering figs.  “My soul,” in the words of Langston Hughes, “has grown deep like the rivers” and beautiful are the souls of my people. All told, though, this old oak tree drives deep roots and sprouts green leaves, and so it is with life. And I have concluded one more thing as I stare at unpacked boxes: I have way too much stuff. So live in his joy and bask in his glory and, every once in awhile, give stuff away or at least have a garage sale!


John Duncan is pastor of First Baptist Church in Georgetown, Texas.


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