Glory days

However, as it is written: “No eye has seen, no ear has heard, no mind has conceived what God has prepared for those who love Him.” (1 Corinthians 2:9)

This past Saturday, I attended my 30-year high school reunion. I found it amusingly fitting that the night before my reunion, a 58-year-old Mike Tyson fought a 27-year-old Jake Paul. Watching the fight, it was painfully clear that while the man on the screen was certainly Mike Tyson, it wasn’t exactly Mike Tyson, if you know what I mean. The same sentiment applied to my reunion.

Receding hairlines and expanding midsections aside, I still found myself overwhelmed by waves of nostalgia as our senior class video played in the background and as I caught up with people I had not spoken with for 10, 20, or even 30 years. In fact, I often find myself nostalgic for my senior year of high school, when I was finally the big man on campus, so to speak, the star athlete and top student, with so many underclassmen looking up at me. At least in my memory, there was a glory I experienced, a kind of fame or approval that still has a pull on me, 30 years later. As Bruce Springsteen put it:

Glory days, well they’ll pass you by
Glory days, in the wink of a young girl’s eye
Glory days, glory days

But if I really think about it, I realize that my longing for those days is not really a longing to be 18 again. I know that if I could actually go back, I would find that the reality was not nearly as glorious as my memories have made it out to be. There was a lot more angst, sadness, and feelings of rejection than I have chosen to remember. The truth is that my feelings of nostalgia wake me up to the fact that I am longing for SOMETHING, something glorious that my senior year was merely a shadow of. No one has put it better than C.S. Lewis in his incredible essay The Weight of Glory:

I am trying to rip open the inconsolable secret in each one of you – the secret which hurts so much that you take your revenge on it by calling it names like Nostalgia and Romanticism and Adolescence… We cannot tell it because it is a desire for something that has never actually appeared in our experience… The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing. These things – the beauty, the memory of our own past – are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself, they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshippers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never visited.

Our feelings of nostalgia, our longings for past experiences, are, in Lewis’ words, “echoes of a tune we have not heard.” They are meant to be a sign directing us to set our hearts on something greater, on a place we have yet to visit, but in which we will spend eternity. As the writer of Ecclesiastes put it, “He has set eternity in our hearts” (3:11). And as Paul put it so eloquently, “No eye has seen, no ear has heard, no mind has conceived what God has prepared for those who love Him” (1 Corinthians 2:9). Amen to that. I have no doubt that those will be the real glory days.