It isn’t Christmas anymore. The New Year is old enough that I have had to pay the bills and Easter is very distant with Lent, the Great Fast, coming before the next feast. Even the secular party, the Super Bowl, is a month away.
We are in normal time, back to normal music (Hamilton sound track and less Bing Crosby) and normal entertainment. Politics will soon dominate the news and most of us are already tired of everyone running. I was a young man and now I am old and Hillary Rodham Clinton has been, is, and who knows may always be running.
Nothing is less special than another Clinton campaign.
So we have come to normal time. Read my Bible. Pray. Love my family. Help The Saint Constantine School develop accredited, classical Christian education that will not drive the people of Houston into debt: kindergarten through college. That is good, great even, but it is no holiday.
The business of life is normal time, the do your duty time. Most of life is normal time and the key to a happy life is loving normal time. There is no adrenaline rush from normal time, like even the bad times can give us.
Of course, some wiser than I am person is going to point out that “normal time” is full of joy, because the day-to-day work of creating, loving, and educating is full of wonder. No human being should ever stay at a job or be forced to live in a place that does not have the capacity to be wonderful in normal time.
Put a Christmas decoration on an ugly tree and Linus can teach us to love it. The green buds of Easter can make even a trashy urban field look inviting, but here in normal time, things are as they are. I got to meet today with the folks I work for at The School and they were delightful, fun, and opinionated. We did not have a party, we did our jobs. That is good.
In a good relationship, there are bad times, splendid times, and normal time. Normal time is just now when I am writing, Hope is attending to her business, and the adult children are scattered over Houston living life. Normal time is bread and not cakes and I like bread and butter. This is not the fast, bread and water, or the feast, food too delectable to be eaten every day, but is the bread and butter time. This is no honeymoon or crisis, but today and it is good.
Crying out to God is easy during the lows, Hosanna*!, or the highs, Hallelujah*!, but most proper in the normal time. In God’s perfect plan, the evils we face should not have been, but are the result of His world having been shattered. He will make them better, for which we are thankful, but things are out of joint. It is the hour of darkness when nihilism seems most plausible. In the great times, the holy feasts, the greater things are, the more like Heaven to come, the more wrenching the jolt when they must be left behind us. We are thankful, but we know that the first day of Christmas means there are just eleven to go. Hedonism is an easy temptation in any party.
Normal time is good with the highs and lows modulated so that both can tolerated. The goods are not so good as to make us long too much for Heaven (not yet! almost!) and the bad is bearable so that we do not despair. We are in normal time.
Thank God.
———-
*God save us!
*God be praised!
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In