Normalcy in the Age of Nothing Normal

She wore green for the broadcast this morning because it’s St. Pat’s Day. Gayle King called attention to the color as she prepared to lay into the headlines because, the newscaster said, “I’m craving some normalcy when nothing is normal.” 

Soon a program segment commented on New York’s normally bustling intersections as “deserted, desolate streets,” complete with eerie, quiet images. And I think of the county high school parking lot I pass every time I drive into town: Not one car. We’ve gone as a nation, one reporter continued, “from don’t [travel] to Italy to don’t go to the neighborhood bar.” And another phrase from the newscast to depict the nature of things now: a “social-life shutdown.”

And then there’s that phrase social distancing. What used to be a negative (“Oh, I don’t like how he’s so distant emotionally”) now, in the new pandemic normalcy becomes not just a virtue, but a mandate.

This is strange, new territory for all of us. There’s been nothing like it in recent memory. Maybe ever. 

The virus, an “invisible enemy” as someone else put it on this morning’s news show, is insidious. It comes with so much uncertainly attached. There’s so much we don’t know. 

And our normal recourses have vanished. As one of my daughters-in-law put it, “Normally when something happens we turn to one another; we band together to give comfort. But now we’re told we can’t. That we need to stay away from one another.”

What irony! At one of the most uncertain times in American history, we are asked to put separating spaces between us and others.

I’ve been thinking about what it means. What I’m being asked to come up with as a Christian, what I’m supposed to show up with for the challenges.

First, I’ve thought, now, as in whenever and wherever there is hardship, I can ask what it means that I am called to offer compassion. “Love in the Time of Pandemic,” to echo a renowned novel’s title—what will it look like? I know that I’ve been trying to make more phone calls than normal, write more notes, send more personal emails, allow more time to chat with neighbors. Love means sometimes pushing through the temptation to allow anxiety to make me disoriented, passive. Last night, getting ready for bed, I found myself staring off into the distance. “Are you okay?” Jill asked. “I just feel preoccupied,” I said. I mentally had to shake myself into the present. “I’m working mentally on the virus--how best to respond.” Somehow, love has a guiding place in all my musings.

Which leads to another word-thought about what to bring to this strange St. Patrick’s Day: Creativity. In more than one conversation, I’ve heard (or said), We’ve never had to deal with this before. Patrick, not the cartoon version but the pioneering bishop and missionary, centuries ago helped convert an entire country. That was some challenge. In our age, it will take all kinds of novel strategies to deal with the havoc of a novel coronavirus. We confront the contagion not just of a microbe, but of spreading anxiety, if not panic. What do we say? How do we roll up our sleeves and chart emotional territory waiting to be claimed? How can we be a peaceful, non-anxious presence in a world tempted to hysteria?

I’m trying also to work with one more word today: an elusive one that I think at my best moments is not only possible, but crucial: Peace. What Scripture calls the “peace that surpasses understanding.” Peace that comes from knowing God has not put social distance between his beloved and God’s very self—between himself and me. God can and does draw close. Not to be glib, Christ’s presence can help us not feel so lonely. All the more when I realize that that presence works in ways that are vividly kind, full of all kinds of creativity. That possibility holds when things are normal and when they are decidedly, wildly not.