Every day reminded me that all of creation is groaning for redemption.
Waking up each morning over the summer to news reports: terrorist attacks on trains and explosions in major cities; American police officers using their guns as a first resort against unarmed African-Americans and the ensuing protests; an attempted military coup in Turkey; devastating floods; train collisions; and the ever-looming spectre of a new American President.
Public spaces seemed suddenly very dangerous places to be and, if we went in search of the news that didn’t reach the headlines, we might have had good reason to retreat under duvets and only emerge when the news apps on our phones had quietened down. Waking up to these reports each day made it feel as though the world was all violence and damage, relentlessly so.
Pokémon GO
Every day of July, 21million people in 26 countries were playing Pokémon GO and 4 million new users were downloading it, making it the biggest mobile game in history. Churches who found themselves to be Poké-stops provided refreshments to players stopping by, as all over the world identifiable groups of people met to go on Poké-walks together, viewing the world through the augmented reality of the app on a mobile phone screen.
Its rapidly rising popularity was unavoidable and the astounding reports of the numbers of people playing Pokémon GO gave us a different set of statistics to the numbers of people who had died or were missing due to the floods in China.
Nostalgia and remakes
How did these things run parallel? Why did we hear as much about the resurgence of a late 1990s card game-gone-digital as we did about racial inequality, terrorist attacks and presidential debates? Pokémon GO is by no means alone as a resurrected cultural artefact.
The last 12 months has seen the announcement of a four-part return of Gilmore Girls on Netflix (ten years after it ended), the release of and publicity furore surrounding Harry Potter & the Cursed Child, in Finding Dory the revival of Disney Pixar’s 2003 world of Finding Nemo; the list goes on. For the past few years Disney have been helping us to enjoy afresh many of its classic animations remade as live-action films, such as The Jungle Book, Cinderella and Maleficent. 2017’s live-action version of Beauty & the Beast will bring a hybrid of nostalgic character favourites, as Hermione Granger dons a yellow dress to take on the role of Belle.
At home
We love to relive the stories we already know. As someone who was the same age as Harry when the original seven Potter books were being released, reading the script of the new play (the Cursed Child) felt like being back at home with old friends. ‘Home’, a word so loaded with meaning and longed for by every human who has ever existed. High Street shops are currently filled with fashions which hark back to when the Spice Girls ruled the charts, with crop tops, jelly sandals and plastic stretch chokers once again filling the wardrobes of teenage girls.
Recently, a whole film about the bright-haired, pencil-topping trolls that graced pencil cases of the 1980s was released in cinemas, creatively entitled Trolls. Afraid to look forward to the future in all its wild, potentially violent uncertainty, we look back to the comforting familiarity of the past and rehash it. Is revisiting the familiar in a time of deep social anxiety the cultural equivalent of hiding under a comfort blanket and blindly hoping for the best?
True security
Maybe these cultural artefacts of nostalgia have a rightful place in our response to the horror that’s reported in the news and the brutality we see every day. We need to be reminded that goodness, security and safety exist, and so we immerse ourselves in that which we know, fearful of an unknown future. We need shelter from terror and evil, and our need to escape them is met momentarily, imperfectly, by these cultural comforts.
As Christians we know that, violent and uncertain as the future may seem to be to us, it is certain in God’s hands, and his promise is ultimately to end all violence, and demand an account for that violence which has been committed. There’s a home and a future which will perfectly embody the goodness and security we’re looking for. We may find a temporary sense of security in reliving the past, but as Christians we can face the unknown future without fear, knowing that every longing for shelter from evil, for justice to reign, wars to cease and love to rule is ultimately met in Jesus, the Prince of redemption and unrelenting peace, whose kingdom will never end.
