Normal

In the months leading up to and the months after the election, we reminded ourselves that this is not normal. This was not politics as usual, this was not governance as usual, this was not the behavior we expected from those seeking office and those in office. It was important, we told ourselves, to remember that this was not how things were supposed to be. We couldn't settle in and let this become our new normal. I remember reading several very earnest thinkpieces about this. A whole bunch of tweets, too. 

It's an open question, I guess, as to whether we actually settled into a new normal or not. Depends on your definition of normal. Normal is what you're used to, maybe, and eventually what you're used to becomes what you expect and what you expect becomes what you think is right. The ever-present veneer of stress that's coated everything from the last year maybe means that low levels of panic are the new normal, but I guess that's up for debate. It's not like it hasn't been a stressful year in my individual life, in its own small way, and it's hard to separate the subjective from the objective, or the shared subjective from the individual subjective. But regardless, we're all worn down, I think, and rightly so. If you're not, you're not paying attention. 

These past few weeks have given us a powerful example of that. If you think our nationwide conversation around sexual assault is telling us something new, you haven't been paying attention. If you think it's an anomaly, you've been living in a different world from everyone else. Those with power have always abused that power, whether it's the physical power to force themselves on someone or the social power to make someone do something they don't want to do and then keep quiet about it. Talking about sexual assault forces us to see vulnerability in myriad forms and confronts us with all the ways in which we have not protected or cared for the vulnerable. 

Advent is a time of repentance, though goodness knows we never think about it like that. It's a time of confronting what we've allowed to become normal, to measure our lives, our communities, our societies against the standards brought to us by the prophets and by Mary and, eventually, by Jesus. We have settled into either presumption or despair, asserting that this is the best we can do or that this is just the way things are, but that is not what the prophets tell us. The prophets scream that this is not normal. This is not the way that things should be. This, our world, our lives, these things are not right. They are not just. They are not love.

And so we must repent. We must turn away from these things that should not be and turn toward the vision of things as they will be. The mighty are sent away empty because they have already received their reward and the vulnerable are cared for and kept safe. The world at war because of pride and conceit will become the world at peace, where weapons are changed in shape from things that end life to things that tend it. The unfixable mess of a world that we have made will be redeemed into the world as it should be, where an end to tears comes not from hardness of heart but from healing. The new normal of the kingdom of heaven will be a beautiful rest compared to the normal built from the turbulent norms we've let accumulate here. 

So this Advent, as 2017 drags us on through its final month, let's seek a new normal. Let's tear down the norms inside of us that we've accepted in our presumption or despair and rebuild our expectations with justice in mind. Let's prepare ourselves for the night when we, with Mary and Joseph and the shepherds and all of the least of these gather around a manger and see a normal that we never could have expected: all the unjust powers of this world brought to their knees by a vulnerable little baby asleep in the hay. 

Oh, Jesus. 

Get here soon.