Just over two years ago, just before Covid, I found myself weeping in a theatre. The movie, The Rise of Skywalker, was part of the Star Wars franchise. 

            Why the tears? The movie, was not, after all, high art. It’s a cartoon drawn with live actors and full of especially silly effects.

Luke, Leia, and Han!

            A bit of background. The Rise of Skywalker’s plot is much the same as that of every Star Wars movie. The Resistance—good guys and gals—is once again down on its luck and hiding. The evil Emperor Palpatine is back with a new fleet of planet destroyers. The last and most beautiful Jedi knight, Rey, is the chosen one to save the universe. After several light-saber duels and gun battles; after jumping from one moving space ship to another; after sailing a tiny boat across a raging sea; after dying and rising from the dead; Rey Palpatine—for it turns out that she is the evil emperor’s granddaughter—Rey Palpatine defeats the evil emperor and decides to change her name to Rey Skywalker (the good). The universe is saved. The end.

            Silly? Yes. Cartoonish? Absolutely. 

            And yet. watching a The Rise of Skywalker matinee at Yorkdale theatre in Toronto, I wept. Not just a bit around the edges, but big tears rolled down my face. Why?

            Nostalgia. I saw the first Star Wars movie in the summer of 1977. I was 20. I went with three other guys, days before we all hopped in a car and drove across Canada and back on ten dollars a day. I was so carefree back then. I wasn’t taking my studies seriously. I had an uncomplicated relationship with church and faith that fed me. I wasn’t thinking about the future or my dreams. I had a loving family. Life was good.

            But now, as I watched the latest Star Wars movie and remembered the first, I realized that of the four of us who went on that road trip, two have already died untimely deaths. So right off, sitting in that theatre, I’m thinking both about how good life can be, but also how brief and full of loss it can be. You know. Several family members have died. My church and faith life have become hugely problematic. And all of it choked me up.

            We’ve come a way since the Psalmist said we might live to be seventy—or eighty if our strength endured. Many of us will actually live to 90 or even 100. Still, I won’t live forever, and my life, like yours, is now full of cares and concerns, as well as joys and satisfaction, that I could not have imaged when I was 20. Watching Rise of Skywalker triggered memories of my first Star Wars movie and homesickness for carefree times. Those were the days, my friends. 

            Once, a few years ago, before my tears, I wrote a sermon critical of nostalgia. I said that nostalgia has a sweet aroma, but we too often weaponize it. For example, we may unrealistically remember the past as nothing but a time of surpassing blessing and think less of the present by way of comparison. This sort of nostalgia that inspires slogans like, “Make America Great Again.” But if you think about it, “great” like when? When Ronald Reagan was president? But his campaign slogan was also “Make America Great Again.” So great like when? Like the pre-civil-rights era? Great like the Great Depression? Great like during the slavery or reconstruction eras? Great like when Sir John A. McDonald and other Fathers of Confederation conspired to cultural – and physical -- genocide by setting up Residential Schools and using hunger as a political tool?

           Nostalgia can also be weaponized by using true memories to beat on the present. This happens in churches, a lot. Why don’t we have two hundred kids in Sunday School anymore? Why is church empty compared to thirty years ago? Why is there so much strife and anger in our denomination compared to when I was a kid? 

            But nostalgia doesn’t have to be weaponized. As with other human emotions, nostalgia can also build us up. Nostalgia can inform our hopes and dreams for the future, even if we’re in trouble now. 

           

            Constantine Sedikides recounts how concentration camp sustained themselves by telling stories about past meals and gatherings, before the Nazis came. “This is what we did,” one survivor said. “We used our memories to temporarily alter our perception of the state we were in. It was not a solution, but the temporary change in perception allowed you to persevere just a bit longer. And that could be crucial.” Nostalgia insists on emotionally monetizing the past, even when it wasn’t perfect.

            Nostalgia, then—tears at a Star Wars movie—doesn’t have to be a sign of weakness. On that day nostalgia was mostly a harbinger for tomorrow’s possibilities. There will be more road trips, more friends, more loving family, and more carefree days—along with disappointments, too.

            But I will face these disappointments with gratitude rather than bitterness. Nostalgia’s sweetness—in spite of difficult memories mixed in—is an invitation to new adventures rather than a setting down one’s roots in the land of loss. 

            It’s very exciting. I could almost cry. Which I did. At the Star Wars movie.