Do you enjoy a good bit of nostalgia? I think most of us do. And it’s not just personal – those lucky memories of those who had beautiful childhoods or carefree adolescences –

Because there’s often an element, in the pleasures of nostalgia, of knowing our experiences as shared. The hazy rosy memories of “how it was, back in our day”. The norms and the patterns, the visuals and the rituals, the soundtrack of existence at any particular time, in all its specificity – that didn’t just make us who we were but were also the framework around who we were with. 

So that the warmth of the nostalgia isn’t so much about “oh, it was beautiful” or “oh, it was carefree” as it’s just about “I remember this and I’m not the only one”. It’s the connectedness of it. The simple pleasure of there being interlocking places where our individual memories overlap.

I recall being at a house party when I was in CEGEP that descended into an absolute chaos of weeping laughter – when someone was looking a little worse for wear and someone else invoked “Michel Michot et le gateau”. Because if there were a bunch of things that no anglo kid in Montreal could escape in the 1970s, one of those was Ici On Parle Francais -- the merciless set of French language textbooks that haunted our childhoods with recurring characters we came to loathe. Pierre and Suzette. Their dog Pitou. And of course Michel Michot and his unfortunate gateau.

Haunted our childhoods how much? Turned out every one of us could recite those stories a decade later without even breaking a sweat. And that night we did. Starting with poor old Michel Michot. Pictured in those old textbooks miserably propped up on a wall with the sickly green face after pigging out on stolen cake that he thoroughly deserved.

It’s fun, nostalgia. Even when it has a shadow side. Even when we know full well that our shared laughter in the fun of the nostalgia’s probably part of our protection from the shadow side. Because what we rarely articulate, and we certainly didn’t that night, is how thoroughly our childhood as anglo kids in Montreal in the 1970s was seriously shaken and upended and unsettled and insecure by the political machinations with which we came to learn that Ici On Parle Francais. Here… we speak French.

Nostalgia softens those hard edges, blurs that shadow side, it’s self-protective. Just ask the Israelites in the middle of wilderness, in the passage we heard earlier from the book of Numbers. Casting their minds back nostalgically to those former days in Egypt when they had meat and fish – cucumbers, melons, and leeks, and all of it was FREE. 

Which yes it certainly was… because back in Egypt they were enslaved. They were fed “for free” by the Egyptians who owned them. They were fed like the Egyptians’ cattle were fed – to leverage their bodies for their owners’ labour. Those pyramids weren’t going to build themselves.

And it’s not that the Israelites have forgotten that, now that they’re in the wilderness, free at last from slavery by God through Moses. They do know full well the rather stunningly obvious “shadow side” to those glory day memories of when food came in varieties – 

They’re really just tired of manna. That flaky bread-like substance that’s pretty much all they now have to eat. They’re really just tired of manna, morning noon and night. They’re tired of wandering, they’re tired of the wilderness, they’re tired of all of it. 

So, “cucumbers, melons, and leeks for free” -- it’s just the hazy rosy nostalgia they turn to in their current misery. It’s pure self-protection. If they don’t want to succumb to despair, they need fuel for anger. And if that requires some serious softening of the edges of their memories of the past – cucumbers, melons, and leeks for free! -- then that’s what it requires.

And so be it. Amen. Except that Moses isn’t having it. Because what Moses HAS had, is enough. Enough with remembering Egypt like it wasn’t manifestly slavery. Enough with the stories of cucumbers, melons, and leeks like they were ever even APPROACHING enough to make up for the suffering and the oppression and the cruelty and the FACT… of slavery.

There’s a point past which the softened edges of nostalgia, the retroactive rose-ification of our memories of the past, becomes an actual loss of touch with the actual events of that past – and the Israelites are dangerously close to that point.

And Moses is fully fed up with being singlehandedly responsible for preventing them from tipping into it. So he asks God for help, and he gets it. And it’s good. God’s spirit pours out over seventy elders to assist Moses in his leadership, plus two more extra – Eldad and Medad – sort of by mistake but it’s all good, and now the leadership is shared. Now the responsibility for sustaining for the Israelites a clear and accurate picture of how things actually WERE in Egypt – so they’ll understand the WHY of this difficult journey through the wilderness and day after day of manna – is shared. 

And Amen says Moses – now let’s keep going.

But if that’s the end of this particular episode, which it is, what its unfolding thoroughly speaks to – not only to the Israelites then, but to us equally now – is how urgently it matters to God for those easier soft edges and hazy broad-strokes sketches of our understanding of the past to get queried. To get challenged. To get corrected. By stark and accurate reminders of the fullness of what actually happened. 

Remember where you were. Remember how it was. Not fuzzily, hazily, self-protectively rosily, but accurately. So you’ll understand the WHY of the journey or struggle or wilderness you’re going through now.

It’s a lesson the Israelites learned hard-core from this episode. But the Bible’s capacity to speak God’s Word into human history isn’t actually limited to the particularity of the history in which it arose. That’s the source of its life but it’s not the limit of that life. And so how urgently it matters to God that God’s people remember to let our own nostalgic memories and perspectives on the past be queried and challenged by the actual historical record – that translates to here. That translates to now.

It translates, in fact, to the process of Truth and Reconciliation in relation to the Indian Residential School System to which we’ve committed as people of the United Church and simply as Canadians, in a really important way. And I say this from kneedeep in not only Biblical studies but also history and Canadian history and Canadian church history.

Because whatever collective self-protective hazy nostalgic sense we have about “it was meant with good intentions” or “we didn’t know that harm was being done” or “that’s just how everyone thought back then” – these just don’t stand up to challenge by the historical record.

Because there were always Moses voices, all the way along. Christian voices, Canadian voices, church officials, government officials. Who heard those Residential School versions of “cucumbers, melons, and leeks for free” and said “Are you kidding me with this? Children are being dragged from their homes, stripped of their identities, whipped for speaking their own language.”

Cucumbers, melons, and leeks for free…There were dissenting voices on the floor of multiple General Councils of the United Church in the 1930s and 40s and 50s who protested our involvement. Who quoted the government’s open admission that the goal wasn’t education but simply ensuring that all traces of Indianness would be erased from Canada – from family bonds to language to traditions. That the goal was disintegration. Full assimilation via menial work. And notably, in no small measure, so that the lands set aside for reserves could be reclaimed.

There were always Moses voices, truth-telling. There was Dr. Peter Bryce, as Chief Medical Officer for the Department of Indian Affairs, who unleashed a massive report in 1907 that conditions at the schools were appalling and the starvation, illness, and death rates were astronomical. And if Indian Affairs suppressed that report, journalists didn’t. They made it public – it was in newspapers across the country. People knew that children were dying in Residential Schools in alarming numbers. They knew Residential Schools had cemeteries. And there were Moses voices -- there were people who stood up and said “this isn’t acceptable, it isn’t right, it isn’t somehow normal”. 

The ordinary boarding school my husband attended in rural BC was opened in 1916 – under all the same childhood disease conditions as any Residential School. But it did not have a cemetery. Because that would have been horrifying.

There were reports and protests and dissents. Those Moses voices standing up to challenge “cucumbers, melons, and leeks for free” – they were real. We can’t just look back into a self-protective haze of “that’s just how everyone thought back then” because it wasn’t. There were people from the beginning who knew the system was wrong and they called out the wrongness. 

If the point had been education, there would have been good schools on reserves. And it’s not just a matter of saying that now. There were people who said that then. There just weren’t enough of them.

But then. God’s spirit poured out. And the Moses voices celebrated when the gift of powerful testimony and leadership took root in the elders. In those who were there when. In those who survived. “Cucumbers, melons, and leeks for free? No. Listen to how it was. Listen to what it did to us. Listen and learn about generations whose children were taken, who were separated from their families, who had no parenting, who were taught relentlessly to be ashamed.

“Listen, so you’ll understand why despair, why alcoholism, why addiction. Listen so you’ll understand WHY we are where we are, why here and moving forward is better than there, but why there is going to take a long long process of moving through a wilderness of healing to get past.”

We’re all in the wilderness with Moses and the Israelites. But Truth and Reconciliation is the point when “cucumbers, melons, and leeks for free” is permanently relegated by the movement of God’s holy spirit to the dustbin of soft-edges nostalgia, and its special dismissive harm. No more self-protection. No more Moses trying to cope alone. 

We’re in the wilderness and the elders are speaking – so that all of us will have an honest and accurate understanding of our shared history. 

Because our history doesn’t go anywhere. If it did, there wouldn’t be such a thing as nostalgia. You couldn’t make your average 55 year old Canadian get misty-eyed by playing the opening bars of the Friendly Giant. Our history doesn’t go anywhere. But there has to be truth. The cucumbers, melons, and leeks weren’t free. Amen.