Missing Normal: A Lenton Fast of Pandemic Proportions

Normal: the usual, average, expected, or typical state or condition

It’s hard to believe that only 7 days ago my kids were still in school and we could still go out to eat. Suddenly things are moving from expected to uncertain, from average to unprecedented, from usual to strange, with no firm date on when things will be resolved and homeostasis restored. This week has delivered quite a blow to all things Normal.

Normal is one of those things you fail to appreciate until things… aren’t. It’s like home in a sense. You don’t want to be there all the time, sometimes it feels bland and boring, but you want it there to come back to. We may like to ‘leave’ normal for adventures or experiences, but having a normal to come back to is comforting to us even when we don’t realize it. When every day delivers a new sense that normal is being lost, we start to miss it. We feel insecure, untethered even, without it.

It’s interesting to me that this time of international shut down is occurring during the season of Lent. Lent, in church tradition, is supposed to be a season of fasting. You deny yourself things that you enjoy to remind yourself that these aren’t ultimate things. It helps keep temporal things off the throne where only God belongs. It also reminds us of God’s denial of God’s own self to visit humanity in it’s brokenness, and of divine sustaining grace in the midst of need. Lent opens us to stripping our lives of some of our ‘normal’, of some of the things that we turn to when we should be turning heavenward. It’s this fasting, this parring down, that best prepares us to fully celebrate Easter in all it’s resurrection glory.

We are not a fasting people. We are people who jump from one feast to the next, never feeling satisfied. We wonder why, in the words of Mari Antoinette, “nothing tastes”. So maybe while we are missing our normal, we should embrace this as a season of fasting. We are fasting from busyness. We are fasting from trying to keep up socially. We are fasting from being distracted from our children. We are fasting from excess. We are fasting from the misguided belief that we are in control.

Let’s stop turning our eyes to the ever shifting sands of our current situation. May we turn our eyes heavenward. May this time of disrupted normalcy and season of ‘withouts’ be a teacher. And may it prepare our hearts to celebrate more fully when the season of resurrection and restoration comes at last.