Extremely Normal
by J. Ellsworth Kalas
Earlier this summer I was a passenger on a commercial flight when wisps of smoke began to rise in the cabin just prior to takeoff. I generally ignore such matters, figuring that if anything is wrong a pilot or flight attendant will let us know. Sure enough, the pilot came on with an announcement. His intention was to reassure us. He advised us that this smoke was “extremely normal.” Then he repeated his key phrase emphatically: “extremely normal.”
I was fascinated by his language. Words interest me because I’ve been a preacher for scores of years, which means that words are my stock in trade. “Normal” isn’t the kind of word that gets a modifying adverb, unless it’s something like “quite.” Even “very” seems out of place with “normal.” But extremely? How can something normal be extreme?
As I pondered, however, I thought of some folks for whom I was a pastor in my 38 years in that high calling. I’m speaking of the kind of people, God bless them, for whom “normal” is itself extreme. Life always seems to be delivered to them in crisis packages. I suppose that if they experienced what most of us consider a normal week, one with a fair distribution of smiles, tears, gains, losses, and inbetweens, they would find it so out of the ordinary as to be extreme. Roughly forty years ago I saw the movie, “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.” The movie was based on Solzhenitsyn’s novella of the same title. It was fiction, but it was a product of the eight years Solzhenitsyn spent in a Russian gulag, the concentration camps the Soviet Union maintained for many years for its political and religious prisoners. The movie is roughly two hours of unrelieved darkness, suffering, and human brutality and deprivation. It concludes with a sentence announcing that Ivan will have some several thousand more days just like this one; in the movie the number is specific, but I don’t recall it. Normal days, for Ivan Denisovich.
There are people outside any gulag whose lives, emotionally or spiritually, are like that. Such are their normal days. Sometimes as Christians we have an opportunity to serve such persons, to enter their days for an hour. They often don’t want any advice; they know the pious clichés before we offer them. They simply need someone who will enter their pain for a little while, and by lovingly doing so, relieve it temporarily. The late, great preacherscholar, George Buttrick, was also a great pastor; I remember his saying that as a pastor he could only do a certain amount of such listening. “They drink your blood,” he said; “they drink your blood.”
They do, indeed. And it is for this, too, that Christ died; for this, too, he was wounded and crushed. When we listen in his spirit, we “share in Christ’s sufferings.” Distasteful and extreme as it may seem, bitter days are normal to some exhausted souls, and if we can take their cross for forty or fifty minutes, we make life more manageable for them. I pray for miracles, and I know you do too. But until a miracle happens, we can extend the immediate miracle of love. For a person whose life is nearly always pain or defeat, we can bring a new “normal” for at least a while.
Count it a privilege when you have a chance to do so. You’re sharing the suffering with our Lord.
Callnig all cars, calling all cars, we’re ready to make a deal.