We are not returning to normal. This is it!

We hear so much about ‘when we return to normal’ or ‘the new normal’. Actually we have returned to what is and has been normal for most humans. In so many ways the way of living we have lost through this pandemic is far from normal. Right now we are confronted by realities we have been able to deny or shield from our minds and hearts. That denial and avoidance is what is abnormal.

‘Normal’ can be taken to mean the usual, the common, what is accepted and can be expected. But the word has within it also the idea of a norm, which implies a rule or value to guide us and help us on our way. Our current situation during this pandemic helps us to reconsider what is and what perhaps should be normal for us. 

• What is normal for humankind is the realisation that the world is a scary place. Beautiful beyond our imagining, yet also very scary. Things we cannot see or predict can kill us. Sickness and death are constant and real possibilities in the midst of everyday life.

• What is normal is to recognise that we are not in control. We have spent so much energy and enterprise in insulating ourselves from the forces of nature. We travel in insulated comfort. Our homes protect us from the ravages of wind, rain and sun. We manage ‘our’ environment and our life-style. Except that we don’t, not completely. We are not in control.

• What is normal is the realisation of mystery: we do not have all the answers. We have achieved so much, through brilliant science, medicine, economic management and education. We have drawn the wrong inference: we have all the answers. There is a cure for everything—a pill, a procedure, an effective remedy. Not true.

• What is normal is the realisation that power is an addiction, which takes hold of structures and those within them, constantly drawing them into self-deception, to serve themselves while pretending to be concerned for the public good. Left or Right, political processes must be suspect, subjected to challenge not so much from above but from ‘below’, from the people they are meant to serve. Empire, in all its forms, is always the enemy of a common wealth, no matter what it promises. We have been lulled into forgetting this, or even chosen to pretend that the powers are our friends.

• What is normal is the realisation that we need each other just to live. The illusion of the strong man or woman, self-made, self-sufficient, independent, has led us into so many forms of illness, in spite of our fitness schedules and mindfulness. For humans, as with all other creatures, to be is to belong. Ecology is not new. Life together is of the very essence. We need each other. 

We have not moved into a new normal. 

• We are engaging with what is normal, at last: we are driving less and have stopped polluting our cities, streets and atmosphere. We can see the hills in the distance for the first time in decades. 

• We walk more and see each other in the street. People actually speak as we pass (at a sufficient spatial distance)—and often it is with a smile, rather than the need to rush away ignoring us. 

• Parks and paths are being used for the purposes for which they were created, as we enjoy being in the open air, participating in the community of creation. Quietly. Slowly. Peacefully.

• We cook more. People are making their own bread and preparing food in the home, for each other. Sadly, many are also drinking a lot more alcohol.

• Local community life is happening, as people look out for an elderly neighbour or deliver supplies to someone who shouldn’t risk going out. Teddy bears in the window invite children to know they are included too.

• We are experiencing the sadness and stress of not seeing our family members so often or so easily—and realising how precious it is to hold a child, to visit an elderly aunt, to see the whole mob gathered. That is not to mention how hard it is to farewell our dead when we cannot be present, or celebrate a marriage with a big bash. 

• ‘Working from home’ has its real challenges. It is not an easy option. What is ‘home’ time and what is ‘work’? Managing our time and space in this situation does cause us to consider how much we are really there when we are at home. Sadly, frustration and violence are also part of the situation for more people than we realise. That too is what has been ‘normal’.

• Meetings have a new sense of the verb meeting. It is not only about the agenda. It is about engaging with each other, listening to each other, finding some common understanding or way to work this or that through. 

• Which brings me to whatever it is that we might now mean by ‘church’. The authorities have listed gathering for worship as a non-essential activity. Places of worship were closed in one of the early stages of the shut-down. The Church has had to learn to be the Church without the presumption of regular gatherings. What is the Church? Who defines the life of the Church? Some of the recent discussions about Communion or Eucharist while dispersed—according to some, not possible—reveal the assertions of power and ownership by some, the desires and needs of others, and the openness of some leaders to find new ways to meet the people’s needs. What is central to worship, to the life and meaning of the Church? How are these matters explored and decided? To wrestle with and find some working solution to these issues is in fact a continuous and normal part of being the Church. 

• But it has to be acknowledged by those of us who have spent a life time in the Church that we too have mostly been deluded about where power truly lies. We have all too easily made our peace with the status quo, with the Empire in all its guises. We have allowed the surrounding culture to define our place in the world. We have failed to place our priority on those pushed aside by the powers that be and the gods of money, status, possession and predictability, control. We too have created our own ‘normal’. 

It is time to return to the ‘norm’ of faith. We depend for our life on the grace of God, the giver of life to all, without favour and without our deserving. We depend for our life on the earth and its bounty. We depend for our life on belonging to one another. We depend for our life upon hope, upon justice, upon respect. We all need these things and we ought to practice them for everyone. We need to return to what has been named the earliest Christian creed, though it is older than that: We are all children of God. (Full stop.)

So it is that we can also affirm the many small graces and blessings by which we live. Life itself is ‘new every morning’. While it is true that death is closer than we have been willing to accept, even more so life is with us, around us, before us, in us. We live. Let us be thankful. This is and should always be our norm, a rule to live by.  

Once again, the brilliance of the Gosford Anglican Church noticeboard says it all: