(37) New Normal vs. New Reality

    (Note: This blog entry is based on the text for New Normal vs. New Reality, originally shared on August 3, 2020. It was the thirty-seventh video for our YouTube Channel, Streams of Living Water (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCB7KnYS1bpHKaL2OseQWCnw), co-produced with my wife, Rev. Sally Welch.)

   Sally and I ordered something from Amazon about a week-and-a-half ago, and when the order went through I said, “Wow! They said some of the items won’t get here until August!” Then I realized that it was almost August. And now it’s here. How did that happen?

   I posted a meme yesterday that showed a hose bib (the water tap to which a hose is connected). The caption was “Tap on the screen”. I don’t know how many people, like me, tapped on the screen before realizing that there was a tap. On the screen.

   I wondered, do I always understand what I am seeing? Is it necessarily what I think it is?

   We’re now in a place where California has become the first state to exceed 500,000 coronavirus cases, where over 154,000 people in the United States have died, and where experts are telling us to prepare for173,000 by the end of this month, with many more to follow. California is now seeing 56% of cases hitting people under 50. Deaths are rising in states all over the country and are beginning to touch even the smallest towns, and where cases are leveling off only because of lags in test results.

   At the same time, people are still attending large gatherings, not wearing masks, heading back to school or sending their children there, not quarantining, not doing anything that would help decrease the spread of the coronavirus.

   Our current situation highlights the difference between the new normal and the new reality.

   “Normal” is often what is the accepted behavior of the group that you are in or most closely identify with.

   What qualifies as normal behavior in one place, may be considered very not normal in other places. Sometimes, what’s accepted behavior in a small town is accepted only because people there know you and have known you for a long time. The have come to accept your kind of behavior as normal.

   A wide range of behavior in a large city goes without notice because there are a lot of people there and you can be anonymous. It’s been said that everyone is normal until you get to know them. You can get away with a wide variety of behaviors in a large city without very may people outside your acceptance group knowing. You can always reinvent yourself if you can escape your group and move to another neighborhood. Or, you can re-create the characteristics of a small town withing a big one.  

   It’s said that there is less mental illness in England, because there is such a wide variety of behaviors that are just written off as eccentric behavior. Such eccentrics are, in fact, valued.

   We watched a NBA game where the stands were filled with both cutouts and with “virtual fans”. There was crowd noise broadcast to make it sound as if the place was filled with people. But, only the players, coaches and a few workers were actually in the stands. It was weird.

   Yet, the artificial elements improved the fan experience over having nothing but cutouts in the stands and the players on the fields. We are beginning to accept “better than nothing” as the new normal.

   Reality is something different. Reality is what it is. As I’ve quoted before, Phillip Dick, the science fiction writer, once said, “Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away.”

   In the original Matrix movies humanity has lost a war with machines made with artificial intelligence who have enslaved humanity and placed people in pods to use them for an energy source. People’s consciousness is hooked up to a false reality that appears to be actual reality. A few people escape and try to liberate humanity. 

   At one point, one character finds another who is a new escapee and offers them a choice. Swallow a blue pill that allows them to return to existence in the false reality, or a red pill that allows them to see things as they are. With lots of violence, it contains religious imagery of  baptism and newness of life, and faith, and the question, “Whose reality is it, anyway?”.

   Reality that is genuine reality is shaped by God outside of ourselves, outside of everything in Creation. If the entire cosmos ceased to exist, God would still exist. Theologians have described God as the First Cause, the Ground of Being, Ultimate Reality. That is, if there were no form of consciousness in existence, God would still exist.

*2 Peter 1:16-18

   The world, our experience of reality, is not the way it’s supposed to be. Human beings wanted to be like God. Evil entered the world. We were separated from the living relationship with God for which we were created. We are not the way we were supposed to be.

   But God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believes in him should not perish but should have eternal life. God did not come to this world to condemn the world, but to save it.

   That is the ultimate reality of our age, and of all ages past, present, and to come.

   This is the new reality: we are a new creation, born again, a new people.

*1 Peter 2:9-12

   It is the Holy Spirit, the streams of living water that nourishes and shapes us, that awakens us to the nature of Reality, and gives us the eyes to see what is normal, real, and true.