Kitsch, Cliché, Nostalgia, and Longing for Home

I suppose I was a romantic from my early youth. It might be difficult to convince my wife of that because so much of my expressions of love have changed, and perhaps not all for the better. We grew up one-hundred yards from my grandpa and grandma’s house on the family farm. I had two older sisters, and I was the baby. At ten years old I would receive a baby brother who I had prayed for at length, and then we would all get a sister two years after that—which was the plan because my ten years of playmate-lessness had taught my parents that it was better to have clusters of children. And then, the last two had been boys, and my older sisters were excited to see another girl in the family so it had to be a girl, and it was.

The farm was the most incredible place to grow up—and next to my grandparents! I was homeschooled; out of desperation my mom would turn me loose in the woods where I could act out every adventure from Daniel Boone to Little House on the Prairie. All of my friends were in school so I ran the woods alone during the day, and there was ample time for reflection. I loved the beauty of the country. I spent much time bird-watching, building forts, and visiting my grandmother’s house. She had stacks of bird, animal, and plant reference books, and Country and Reminisce Magazines. The Reader’s Digest, Animals of North America had an idyllic scene in the front pages of a stream with trout, mountains in the background, a still meadow, and every woodland creature and animal converging on the stream. I longed for that place and often imagined that was where we lived. I pored over the magazines with pictures of little perfect churches, covered bridges, and horse-drawn carriages. My dad told me stories of buying dynamite at the hardware store for blowing up stumps and expanding fields. The beauty and adventure from the past cemented my view that older
was better.

As a college student at Bethel I learned that believing older is better was a real factor in the roots of western culture from the Greeks and the Jewish people. The Greeks were living in a declining civilization so looking back was natural. For the Jewish people, Moses was the prized prophet who had written most of the Old Testament, and looking back to his leadership was natural. And then of course, you could trace all the people of the world back to Adam the son of God—a father who was and still is inarguably better.

Some of my first college papers at Bethel had a dominant color, red—occasionally for spelling (spell-check was pretty good by then) but usually for clichés. I didn’t know you could drop several letter grades for using old phrases, but Dr Dreyer was faithful to find any hint of cliché and stomp it out. They were not allowed. There was no explanation for why old phrases were not allowed, just the bright red, “cliché” and lower grades. I adjusted, and eventually I understood.

My art professor, Dale Johnson, taught me another word—kitsch—like a Barbie-doll or tinsel on a Christmas tree. It is the fake, overly sweet, commercialized products masquerading as art but violating the true purpose of it so that even good intentions can lead to the corruption of one’s soul. Kitsch is often used to conjure up Nostalgia—that fuzzy warm feeling of things being right because they are from your past. But it’s a hollow rightness. It’s the kind of thing that can make you feel good about something that is wrong or to despise something just because it is new. One person could have nostalgic feelings about eating lefse while another feels nostalgic about robbing banks. The feeling of nostalgia is not a good moral guide, but it feels like it is. That’s what makes it so dangerous.

For a long time I felt like everything that made me who I am was outlawed. I felt cold and cynical. Where could I go to warm up? Was the feeling of being cozy wrong? Was the longing for home, a place to belong, wrong? This world never stops changing. The better relationships you have, the harder it will be to say goodbye. This life offers just a taste of God and eternity with him. He does not change. We can see him if we look back, and we can see him if we look ahead. To trust in him is to look back to our creator and forward to home. It is a place of beauty, love, and belonging. I am thankful for the love Christ has shown me and for the hope he has given.

—reh