Posts Tagged: getting back to normal

“The Lust to Get Back to Normal”

On October 27, 2020 by Dteb With 0 Comments - down to earth believer

“To be human is to exist, not in stasis or equilibrium: only fossils do that.”[1]

“‘Normal’ is just the name of a town in Illinois.”  (Source unknown)

We all want—or even long—to get back to normal.  Yes, I do too.  However, let me ask you, as well as myself, several questions.

  • What is normal?
  • Why do we want to go back to it?
  • Is our normal “normal” (or perhaps better, our usual normal) a private reality/construct, or a societal reality/construct?  If reality is a societal or relational reality, which society or relationships are we talking about?
  • If we are Christians, is normal even a possibility for us?  As believers, we are called to be counter-cultural.  Have we forgotten this?

Cornelius Plantinga wrote a book titled Not the Way It’s Supposed to Be: A Breviary of Sin.[2]  I’ve only dipped into the book, but I love the title.  Those of us who try to take the Bible seriously recognize that our world has not been “normal” since Genesis 3:6.

And one more question: Was our normal, whether it was individual, familial, or societal, really ever all that normal?  I suspect that, for many of us, good memories are primarily a result of bad memory.

As a believer, indeed as a human, it seems to me that there is something better than “getting back to normal.”  It is making the day, this day, better.  And we can do that, no matter how abnormal our days are or seem to be.  Making this day better appears to me to be infinitely better than lusting after a normal which probably was pretty messed up anyway.

[1] Anthony J. Griffiths, Courage and Conviction: Unpretentious Christianity (Collegeville: Liturgical Press, 2018), 180.

[2] Cornelius Plantinga, Not the Way It’s Supposed to Be: A Breviary of Sin (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995).

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“What is Normal, and Should We Go Back to It?”

On April 22, 2020 by Dteb With 0 Comments - down to earth believer

I hear a lot of people saying, “When can we get back to normal?”  I have often wondered about that myself.  This morning, however, another, very unwelcome question barged into my mind before I could lock the door.  Actually, the question had a traveling companion, which also invaded this morning.

The first question was, “What is normal, anyway?’  And the second was, “Should we really go back there?”

What is normal?  It sounds like a simple question, with an even simpler answer.  But is it?  Who defines normal?  Were we living normal lives three months ago?  And, of course, not everybody was deliriously happy three months ago, I assume.  I am reminded of the saying, often attributed to Will Rogers, that “the good old days ain’t so good anymore.  And they probably never were.”

Perhaps the “normal times” (in America) since World War 2 were not so normal after all.  Perhaps the normal times were an aberration.  Many people thought that the good times would just keep getting better—or at least that the good times were normal and would stay with us.  On what did we base such an assumption?  And then there is the problem that “normal” is not the same for me as it is for my African American friend.

The second question is just as disturbing as the question about what normal is.  It is the question, “Should we go back to normal, even if we can?”  I may just be in an extra-curmudgeonly mood today, but were we really all that normal three months ago?  Perhaps this virus is an opportunity, both for us as individuals and us as a nation, to reflect on whether we were living as we ought.  While I agree that we need to stop (or at least slow down) this deadly disease and (when it is safe) speed up our economy, I question whether “restart” is the best word to use.  Maybe we need to do a major overhaul in our individual and collective lives.

The Bible, particularly the Old Testament prophets and Jesus Christ, did not seem to want the nation or individuals to go back to normal.  Rather, they said that the nation and individuals needed to repent and return to God.  Not to Trump, not to the Republicans, not to the Democrats, not to business as usual.  TO GOD!

Until we return to God, returning to normal won’t solve our deepest problems.  I am reminded of a Christian friend who said many years ago, ‘The status quo is just Latin for “the mess we’re in.’”

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