Nostalgia, Sour Grapes and God

My ongoing desire to sort out emotions about my past found some strange sources last week: A fire, an obscure nostalgic book and some economic philosophy.

The church of my youth caught fire and sustained some damage. It is an historic church, a building that housed my 'family of God', and the place where I swallowed its protestant concepts of theology and social religion whole. I later rejected it, when it failed me. But it is interesting to read the accounts in the newspaper of the reactions of the Pastor and congregants. They are deeply affected by the damage to their sanctuary.

The book is "A Road to Harmony" by JD Ballam. Dr. Ballam is a rather learned, poetic writer who was a classmate of mine and grew up in the nearby village of Harmony, MD. Dr Ballam's memoir is a quaint collection of nostalgic stories and images from his childhood 'at the foot of the Catoctin Mountains in Appalachia', or Fredneck County as I have always thought of it with great affection. I can see a lot of my own childhood in these recollections and the romance of some of those memories are still warm and happy.

The economist is the great John Kenneth Galbraith, who in an essay about social nostalgia had the following gem about the great American family farm: "But while farms do grow larger our verbal commitment to family administration remains complete. It provides virtuous, diligent, and God-fearing parents with a unique opportunity to impress these commendable traits on their offspring. Ignorant, shiftless, cruel, domineering, obscene, and incestuous parents are imagined not to transmit these traits to their offspring. In any case they are not part of the accepted lore."

I lived in the bosom of 'God's Country' for the first two decades of my life. My family is one of the oldest in the county. Legend has it that some of my ancestors were Tories who sponsored some of the Hessian mercenaries housed in Frederick, MD that fought for the Crown during the American Revolution. I have often felt like I grew out of the soil in that rich valley, and that a large part of me is made of the material described in Dr. Ballam's book and celebrated in Middletown's Christ Church every Sunday. But truth be told, there's another part of me that shrugged when I saw that the church where I 'found Christ' caught fire. This part of me is not just apathetic about 'Gods Country', it is the part that feels nauseous at the very thought of being there.

It is a part of me that found the sleazy underbelly of small town life. When everyone knows everyone else, people don't need to connect to each other. A village bully might chew up a congregant, spit them out, back up their truck and run over their victim again for good measure. Some of the villagers might stop and ask the victim if they are OK, while others will walk quickly past not wanting to get involved with such unpleasantness. If the bully shows up at church on Sunday and shares some fellowship with a hymn and a pleasant greeting; then no one will question their behavior.

There's something to be said for some of the people I loved back in God's Country. People I still love, who were kind and fun and clearly touched by the hand of God. The love in their hearts and actions are clear signs of His power. I couldn't finish Dr. Ballam's book of nostalgic remembrances. It was pleasant enough for a while, but the sheer repetition and lack of truth in the stories eventually turned my stomach.