As I am rushing into the day again, after a bit of a failed Tennebrae noise (please, dear Jesus, don’t come back before next year so I can have just one more chance to get it right before the apocalypse), I happened to come across this interesting tweet that sets the tone very nicely for the contemplation of God’s mighty acts in saving the world:
I just want things to be normal again… So many people have become weird over the last few years.
I hope it's just a temporary cultural psychosis, but it does concern me how many (previously normal?) people are now detached from objective, observable reality.
— ZUBY: (@ZubyMusic) April 14, 2022
I was recently vaguely depressed while listening to a book that I love. Can’t remember which one, but it could have been any of them–probably an Anthony Trollop. The problem with so many books–mostly novels, I think, would fall into this category, but also poetry and also paintings, and really anything that human people do to make life more comfortable–is that on the one hand, they are wonderful, and on the other hand, they wreck things for future generations. They build up human civilization, they advance the human experiment in yet one more interesting direction. And, on the other hand, they tear down. So many human inventions do both–building up and at the same moment, tearing down. I have a hundred examples jangling around in the back of my mind, that I can’t put down here, because I have to rush along, but here are just a few: Don Quixote, Little Women, the Automobile, Picasso–obviously I could go on and on and on and on.
But back to the tweeter, who wants to get back to “normal”:
We've always had different opinions and viewpoints, but reality itself now seems to be up for debate.
It's very strange. This hasn't previously happened in my lifetime. Not like this.
— ZUBY: (@ZubyMusic) April 14, 2022
No, nothing like the unraveling we’re seeing now has probably happened to this degree, but we’ve been tearing apart the threads for a long while. We’ve been creating beautiful art that, at the core, only contributes to the death and dissolution that is human striving without God. We’ve been organizing institutions and communities that sort of function, but in the final reckoning, because they don’t want God, they can’t be normal. Though I think some better words would be peaceful and happy. The psychosis at the core of the human heart–idolatry–is being allowed to come out and play. And so everything is getting to be more awful. There is no getting back to “normal,” to that less fretful kind of life where people sort of get along and have basically nice things. At the very least, one might say that where the Tower of Babel failed, the invention of Social Media has stepped into the breach, and look at what kinds of things we can build altogether–dystopia.
But tonight we will remember again that the Son of God stood up and wrapped a towel around his waist, and took the lowest position in the cosmos, himself going down into the depths of our ruin so that he could drag us out of the mire and bring us into the peace for which we so fretfully groan, and yearn. His book, strangely enough, is the only one that tears down what is really wrong–human idolatry and pride–and then, not building yet another broken idea or structure, he raises up, out of his own broken flesh, a community, a fellowship, a Bride.
Which is to say, if you want to get back to normal, we’d love to see you in church!
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