That Strange Nostalgia

 

On holiday, somewhere along the way, you see a medieval church and you stop. The door is open and you go inside. There is no one there and you like that. For you, this emptiness is not empty. You feel something inside. A memory, Fascination? Sadness?  All of these at the same time?

Perhaps you’ve experienced something similar when you once saw an old icon at a flea market or heard a church choir singing beautifully. What do you call that which spontaneously comes to life in you when you see certain Christian images, symbols, historical monuments, cemeteries or hear Bach’s St. Matthew Passion? A sentiment? Nostalgia? Your Christian roots?

When I asked myself these questions, the books written by theologians provided no answer. When such authors talk about Christianity, they always start from the doctrine of their own church. But I did not want to find out how certain passages in the Bible should be understood and which belief is correct and which is not. Faith is one thing, but cultural roots are something different. Therefore, I decided to reread the Gospel, i.e. the four stories about Jesus in the Bible, attributed to his disciples Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. But this time I read it for self-examination, to try to find in it what would evoke an inner resonance in me. That was the only thing that interested me. The absence of any theological knowledge actually served my purpose.

 

It was the second time that I had picked up the Bible. The first time was when I was a student at the Faculty of Arts of Moscow State University. This happened in the manuscript department of the Russian State Library (then the Lenin Library), where I was doing research for my master’s thesis. The subject of the thesis was the Old Russian apocryphal treatise “The Passage of the Mother of God through the Torments”.

The Bible I picked up, an edition printed before the 1917 Revolution, was simply sitting on one of the shelves in the reading room of the manuscript department, which was absolutely impossible in public reading rooms in Soviet times. I could have read the Bible every day if I had wanted to, but I had no such desire. Nor was it necessary for my thesis. Nevertheless, one day I was suddenly seized by curiosity. So, I opened the Gospel of Matthew, the first book of the New Testament.

 

I still remember very well what happened next. I began to struggle through the genealogy of Jesus, the circumstances of his birth, and the events of his youth. I always expected to come across something exceptional – certain passages or statements – that would justify the ban of this book in the Soviet Union. I read about Jesus going to John the Baptist who baptized him, then about his stay in the desert and his struggle with the devil. Finally, Jesus began to proclaim his teaching. And what does he say first? What he heard from John the Baptist: “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand!” At twenty years old, this did not really appeal to me. At the time, I longed for color, play and adventure, I wanted to learn, to enjoy life, and the thought of declaring ‘the poor in spirit’ blessed seemed absurd to me.

My first reading of the Gospel left me with a feeling of disappointment and boredom. I had expected to find more in it. But what did I actually want to find in it? I didn’t know that myself. I had come into contact with the Gospel out of curiosity. The Bible was forbidden at that time and forbidden fruit was supposed to taste sweet. But when I tasted the Gospel of Matthew, it didn’t taste sweet to me but sour.

The second time I started reading the Gospel was thirty years later. When I had established the goal of understanding my ‘roots’ better, things went differently. I started to see Jesus’ insights about life in a different light. And then it turned out that the existential meaning and philosophy of life contained in the Gospel were much more interesting than I had initially thought.

 

It was also important for me to see that this philosophy is not in conflict with the spiritual traditions of other cultures, which I had come to know during my search for the meaning of my own life and in which I had found insights that resonated well with my own thoughts and feelings. This is what can happen when you approach the essence of the Gospel from a personal perspective and look for common ground with your own inner baggage, instead of the foundations of the Christian faith.

I think that discoveries that are the result of an individual spiritual quest not only have an individual significance, but they can also help others, for example, to see more clearly what their own needs are. What one person shares about an experience can also inspire others to do something similar, or it can take them in a completely different direction that is more in line with their own spiritual quest.