The Road to Normal

Here's the hard part.  There's nowhere to start except for where we are; and where we are is profoundly abnormal.  

For those who chafe at the concept of such a thing as 'Normality', we may as well start with the elephant in the room.  You may be one of these people who believes normal is a relative concept; that what is normal in one time and place is not normal in another time and place.  With regard to the lower case 'n' normal, I concede the point.  What I am driving at with capital 'N' Normal is something different.  We might describe it philosophically as man's form; theologically as man's telos.  We could make the case that it is what is natural to man, and what is good for man, but these are harder claims to defend against the onslaught of nihilism and relativism we now face.  Simply put, I would say the Normal man is the man who becomes what he is intended to be.  He is the man who is suited for the Normal life for which he was made.  In the final analysis, one either accepts this concept of Normality or 'Normal' goes onto the same scrap heap as 'Good', 'Just', and 'Beautiful'.

There is not much to say across the divide between the sides which hold these things to be concrete on the one hand, and relative on the other.  I'll not go on further about it here.  If you find yourself on my side of this chasm, you'll have a good sense of how we are using 'Normal' at this point.  The hanging question then is 'What is Normal'?  It's a fair question, but it seems almost too big to answer just yet.  Let's let it hang for a bit longer and come back to it.  For now, let's suffice to say that there is a Normal, even if we've yet to put our finger on it.  

And now our dilemma: we do not start from a place of Normality.  we do not approach this question, or our lives as pure, uncorrupted, right thinkings beings. We do not begin our lives as individuals at all.  We begin life as utterly dependent infants. Our lives are not found in ourselves but depend completely on those around us.  Despite our mythology of the free, untethered individual, making his own way toward 'flourishing' or salvation, the real fact of our biological material existence can be summed up in one word: 'Subject'.

It may well be that man is meant to be free; that he is meant to be an individual--that may be man's Normal condition--but its not the condition we find ourselves in.  No matter how vigorously we insist on our mythology, if it is not so, it is not so.  It's time to give the determinists their due.  We come into existence at a time and place not of our choosing.  Most of us will leave it at a time and place not of our choosing.  We inherit the material world around us as well as the genetic material which forms the backbone and potential of our own physical manifestation.  As utterly dependent beings, we experience the love, the anxieties, the foibles, the cruelty, the indifference of our parents as our minds and spirits are being formed and our bodies nourished.  We learn a language, we become imbedded in a culture, through which our concepts of what is normal, what is moral, what is important, what is beautiful, are formed.  If 'Normal man' is free and not subject; if he is individual and not a mere droplet in the collective torrent, how can he possibly emerge from this prison?

This is the central question of this essay.  Where is man's liberation?  How can he emerge from this soup to become Normal, Meaningful and Good?

In the face of this challenge, there is always a temptation to surrender the task and accept the nihilistic view.  The facts do seem to stack up on the side of determinism.  Our intuition, our certainty that there is more is even accounted for within the prison of man's fate as a mere cog in an unfolding collective reality.  These intuitions, this faith, this need for meaning, could be no more than an artifact. I'm no expert on Eastern religions, but this 'letting go' seems like it might fit as a virtue within a Buddhist understanding of the world.  The Normal man then, is the man who can accept his own meaninglessness.  Perhaps this can bring a certain peace, but it seems like an unsatisfying answer.  In this framework, the Normal is not a form, but formlessness.  The telos is not life, but death.  My knowledge of Buddhism is so scant that I should stop here.  Whether I have represented Buddhism accurately or not, the valuable point here seems to be that one escape from the prison of the torrent is to simply submerge beneath it and accept the subjectivity and ultimate lifelessness of existence.  In this way, we cease to be.  

But how can such nonexistence be man's Normal existence?  To embrace such an idea seems ultimately indistinct from the position that there is no Normal at all.  Indeed, it seems a pretty direct restatement of that claim.  "Normal does not exist" vs. "Normal is to not exist".

If we aren't tempted to accept the Nihilist view or the fatalist solution (and most of us cannot), then we most likely will find ourselves in the camp which simply refuses to acknowledge the torrent.  This is a well populated camp.  Those who choose the mythology of freedom over the reality of their prison bars are many.  If man's Normal state is freedom, why not hurry up and get there already?  Why not live 'as though it were so' now?  This is the great error and untruth at the heart of Liberalism.

The Christian inheritance which Liberalism sought to move beyond carried with it an important understanding.  The fatalism of the East had at least half of the Truth.  It was necessary to submerge beneath the waters and to die to oneself before freedom and normality could be achieved.  But instead of acknowledging the prison and the dead end of the self, Liberalism doubled down on the self.  The mythology of the free self, of the self 'endowed by the creator' in place of the self that needed to die to itself; the mythology of an unfallen self in place of the fallen self, had the terrible misfortune of being untrue.  The Liberal attempt to achieve Normal existence was to pretend that man had already achieved it, and to build society upon that assertion.  It didn't help that prior to the emergence of Liberalism, Christianity in the West had largely swapped out a concept of unfallenness/fallenness analogous to Normality/abnormality or Health/illness, with one more in line with Guilt/innocence or Culpability/Blamelessness.  This perception allowed the illusion of Liberalism to emerge from within a Christian context.  Man's spiritual struggle had come to be one almost entirely built around avoiding guilt and culpability, a moral struggle not unlike that of the Pharisees, rather than a real seeking after abundant life.  Freed from the influences of religion and tradition, his health and normality now seemed no longer to be in doubt, though he remained imprisoned in his walking corpse. 

Liberalism has not proven to be an effective approach.  Rendering ourselves blind to the bars, the guards, the fences, has not done away with the prison.  It has only made the prison invisible to us.  Declaring ourselves free has not brought life to our corpses.  If it has raised the dead, it has only done so as a kind of Zombie Christianity, in which the appetites of the dead are mistaken as the source of life, and the Normal life, the abundant life, are mistaken for the life in which these appetites are fulfilled.  And so we still have not found our way out of the prison.  Liberalism offers the Matrix.  Eastern fatalism offers mere acceptance.  If these were the only choices, Liberalism's Modernism at least presents us with the possibility and power of post-liberal, post-modern nihilism.  So long as we are living in a fantasy land and an untruth, which denies our fundamental reality as embodied beings, why not take control of the quill and the ink well and start writing whatever fantasy best suits us?  Here at least--in power--we find some real illusion of freedom.  Could this be man's form?  His telos?  To seize power in a make believe kingdom and make it in his own lifeless image?  The contradictions are too many.  The Good is merely my 'good'. There is no Truth but my 'truth', the Beautiful is but my 'beautiful'.  There are no eternal realities (no form, no telos)--all is reduced to the subjectivity of whoever's taste is empowered.  It is the Zombie Witchcraft to Zombie Christianity.  No, Fatalism so far has brought us closest to the Normal, if only by at least having respect for the Truth. 

And now, I approach the only answer that I can find.  I hope to do it some justice.  

In place of Zombie Christianity, I offer Christianity.  If the determinists are correct, as I believe they are as far as they go, then the key to unlock free will, and our individualism--the key to unlock life, health, Normality--is not found within, but without.  We are not the source of life.  We are not home to the form.  Our form is not in ourselves, but in Christ.  We are not 'free to choose what we will', rather we are free to choose Christ or not.  Christ or prison.  Christ or death.  While we die symbolically in baptism, we must keep dying in order to take on Christ.  We are not alive now, and waiting to see what will happen after we die.  We are dead now, and our life is in Christ.  This is the significance of Christ raising the dead.  We are the dead.  This is why we 'put on Christ', why we eat His body and drink His blood so that we may have life in us.    We swim against the torrent not by our power--for we have none--but by His power.  We climb out onto the bank not by our will--our will is enslaved--but by His will when we make it our own.  It is the relationship between ourselves and Christ that is home to life.  It is that relationship that offers the uniqueness of individuality.  It is that relationship we were created for, which is our telos.  It is Christ who is our form.  

Prayer.  I believe prayer is the answer, though I am not good and praying and it feels awkward to me.  We modern people don't understand it.  We think we are alive and asking for forgiveness or intercession.  We don't understand that we are dead people praying to a living God; the source of all life.  Pray as a man being carried downstream in the torrent might pray.  Pray as you can.  Pray simply.  'Lord, have mercy on me a sinner'.  'Lord, have mercy on me, a slave in the kingdom of death'. Pray as He taught us to pray.  " Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be Thy name; Thy kingdom come; Thy will be done on earth as it is in Heaven.  Give us this day our daily bread; and forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us; and lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil."