At the opening reception at the beginning of the start of each summer term it is customary for the director to give a ‘solemn charge.’ This summer, as the new director, it was my duty to do so. What follows is the text from that charge.
At Theopolis we have two fellows programs: the music program, titled magnificently “The Te Deum Program” and our flagship program, the -erm- normal fellows program. On Sunday you we will welcome in our glad company the Te Deum students, and you will find yourselves referred to by myself, the faculty, the liturgist, our kitchen team affectionately as the “Normie fellows” or simply as “normies.”
The first time that I heard this it broke my heart. It felt juvenile and carried in its wake much unwanted youth summer camp energy, “I’ve got normie spirit / yes I do / I’ve got normie spirit, / how ‘bout you?”
Is “normal” really the figure we want to inscribe on the lintel and doorframe of what we’re here to do this year? Is “normi-ness” the thing for which our vestries, sessions, wives and families, employers, financial supporters, and churches are making costly sacrifices these next tend days? Certainly not.
I had promised Dr. Leithart that my first act as director would be to put an end to all such offensive and diminutive appellations and come-up with a more glorious name for us —something to rival the regality of ‘Te Deum.’
After much reflection, however, I have decided not to do so. I have repented of my haughtiness.
Normal is exactly what we’re about. And it is the basis of my charge to you tonight.
Normal from Latin norma from the Greek gnomon, meaning carpenter’s square, names an essential pattern or form, the square on which the rest of the measurements are taken. It is the pattern which patterns other things after itself. The cornerstone and arche of any project.
Thus sociologists and anthropologists can talk about the “norms” of a given culture —those essential patterns that are taken for granted and from which the rest of any respective culture takes shape. Theologians can describe Scripture as the norma normans, the norm which patterns the rest of the norms of Christendom: the creeds, the liturgies, the rites, the disciplines of the faith. Pediatricians can track a child along growth curves which designate the shape of developmental norms.
Note, however, that norms not only indicate, “look here is a thing that is happening,” they form; norms speak with the vocative and the imperative, beckoning and commanding. A norm, as Michel Foucault noted, lays upon us an “image of society the function of which is to give individuals both a certain conception of the society in which they live and a certain model for their future” (The Punitive Society, 2015: 214).
A norm creates citizens of a city that is already and not yet; a norm patterns persons as members of a community in the here-and-now, even as that norm also aims the hopes and longings of its citizens towards the promise of a kingdom that is yet to come. Norms are, also, contagious. Norms norm persons, transforming them into “living norms” themselves, commissioned by the norm to go forth and normalize the world in the power of its animating spirit.
Ours is an hour in which the old forms of normality are shattering around our ears; western civilization seems to have spun loose of its gyre; things fall apart. And now new norms, both malicious and salient, vie for ascendancy, fighting for normalizing mastery. It is a time where it seems everything that can be shaken is.
In the face of these shakings, in this current hour of abnormality —of de-normalization, of a contest between collapsing norms— the City of God is the thing that remains, it is the thing that cannot be shaken. The Theopolis Fellows program exists precisely to participate in norming citizens according to the heavenly kingdom. Over the course of your time with us we will study, pray, fellowship, sing, debate, feast, laugh, perhaps weep, not so that you can all be little Leitharts or little Buckleys or little Robertses or little Brianses, but so that you can be patterned according to the City of God; so that you can be normed and, returning home, norm a lost and broken world whose fleshly norms have failed it.
Jerusalem above is our mother and we are her children, which is to say, her normies. Maranatha, come Lord Jesus.