On Alcohol, Nostalgia, and Living in the Present During Advent

Some time ago I wrote a post about about my long relationship with wine, and also about my decision to marry John. I married John, moved out to Lake Joy, and somehow found the courage to write about all these things overtly and covertly depending on my mood. Moods make the piece, whatever they are.

I also wrote about a decision to quit drinking for Lent, then for a hundred days. Six months ago, I quit drinking for at least a year. I’m not sure what I’ll do when the year is up, but I’m sure I’ll write about it. Mostly, these last six months sans alcohol have been fine. I drank wine every day for over ten years. A glass of wine, maybe two, in the evening to relax. To feel my muscles unwind. It helped me cope, and it numbed me in ways I wanted to be numb. There were, of course, days so dark and painful that wine did nothing to touch the searing sadness that consumed me. The reasons for that sadness belong to me, and to those in whom I’ve confided, and also to those who participated in their cause.

The wine accompanied me, became a constant of sorts, over valleys of change, into a new culture, through the woods of life, the lows and highs of being alive, and across the most painful chasm–the dissolution of a marriage, and into the scattered fragments strewn about that I would use to rebuild my life.

Then, as miracles do still happen, as growth does still occur, albeit through disappointment and terrible pain, but also through a kind and generous love, I came to a bend in the road, a crossroads, and could honestly say, with integrity and clarity of mind, “I’m finished and ready to lay this companion to the side.”

I was ready to emerge into the big wide world of adulthood, bear up under my own life and feel it, with all my faculties. This is a marvelous thing.

What I didn’t count on, and didn’t see coming was the tsunami of emotions I would be forced to contend with on a near regular basis. Just yesterday, I walked into Barnes and Noble and strolled into the children’s section, and a wave of nostalgia hit me with such force I had to stop. My kids no longer ask to go to the children’s section of Barnes and Noble. We have outgrown the toy train set in the corner, and have set aside The Mitten by Jan Brett. The pain of outgrowing that beautiful season of my life is nearly unbearable.

From there, I picked up the kids and started driving home, and for whatever reason, memories of Chile began to surface. While Christmas music played in the background, I was undone with images of my life in Temuco. Fresh bread, onions frying on the stove, starting fires, of laughter, incessant chatter. Chileans interrupt incessantly, and at dinner parties everyone talks at once. It’s overwhelming and delightful and filled to the brim. I remembered the way the sky looked at night on my land, wide and expansive, a canopy of twinkling lights, and the confident way Chilean women, matriarchal by nature, could tell me with such confidence that it, whatever it was, would all work out. They are not strangers to hardship or pain, to awful presidents, to earthquakes that upend our lives. I miss them, my Chilean friends, all the way to my bones. And there’s no going back. There is no, “Hey, let’s move to Chile,” in my vocabulary anymore. I am here and it is good. I miss them, and that is not bad.

My children are growing up, they no longer play at train tables and listen to me read snuggled up with stuffed animals. They have set aside their perfect Pottery Barn backpacks with their names embroidered on the front, trinkets of an idyllic time in my life. I cannot go back to that simple past, it is over and it was wondrous in all its tenderness. That season was lived and in many ways it was lived well.

The temptation to linger in nostalgia is in the same family as the temptation to dwell in the shadows of regret, what I wish I’d done, but couldn’t see or didn’t have the courage to do. The lists, both of nostalgia and regret, could go on and and on and overwhelm to no end.

I don’t recommend it. Yes, we must look back long enough to make an inventory and to take responsibility, to thank God and to integrate our past with the present. But we cannot change the past. We can only accept it, and come to terms with it. The more you make peace with your past, the better you are able to emerge into the present.

There is a constant temptation to live in the past, whether in regret or nostalgia, but there is also an invitation to live wholeheartedly in the present, to feel, to love, to be thankful, and to press into the winds of life, not away from them. The promise, even at the risk of sentimentalizing it, is that there is One who is working, renewing, and weaving redemption through and through.

I’ve been taking New Testament Greek for the past ten weeks and worked on a rudimentary interpretation of a chunk of the book of Revelation. It’s the book at the very end of the Bible, hauntingly weird and apocalyptic. There are angels and wheels, swords and scrolls, weird animals, stones of great beauty, and imagery that takes up the whole imagination. At the end of it all, Jesus himself says to John, “Behold, I am making all things new.”

In Christian theology, we have the resources to heal from the past, the confidence to live into the present, and we are given the gift of grace and courage to participate toward the renewal of all things.

So, this Advent, I will wait and I will feel, I will love and receive love, and I will bless the emotional moments in all their ups and downs for they mean that I am alive, that I am clear, and that I am here.

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