new normal

Yes, considering that Life is short and we haven't much Time, I should be drafting a sermon. But it's two weeks away and I've already decided what to talk about that Sunday, and there are other things for Time right now. At the moment, it's reading a favorite magazine, The New Yorker, which comes weekly except that instead of 52 issues the year I think it's 48.

The issue I've just read, and peeled off the address label so it can be left in the mail room for a neighbor to enjoy, is midsummer that covers two weeks, July 10 & 17, 2023. Besides the cartoons, The New Yorker is famous for its whimsical front covers, which are available for sale and to frame and hang. Some of them are wonderful. One could have a wall hanging with every front cover The New Yorker ever published.

On the current issue, a slim girl wearing eyeglasses is sitting on the step reading, while above and behind her, Patience or Fortitude the Lion reads over her shoulder. Pigeons flutter around and settle to read. The apt title of the Cover (their front cover titles are always apt) is "On the Same Page"

Yesterday and Thursday I read most of the issue, the three Fiction pieces, an essay around Dickens, another about Tennessee Williams, "Tables for Two" in every issue sampling a restaurant in New York, a column about a company that rents out chickens and you get fresh eggs. I don't know who does the art, sketches of personalities, but they're gifted and, again, whimsical, charming.

There's much more, but what caught my thoughts was in the next to last essay, on page 78, in an article about San Francisco Opera by Alex Ross, a paragraph that begins, "Forty-five years on, San Francisco Opera is facing the same struggle as performing-arts institutions across the country. Subscriptions plunged during the pandemic and show no immediate sign of returning even to pre-2020 conditions - never mind the full houses that prevailed in Milk's time." In mind that religious worship is itself performing art (yes it is, and here in the liturgical churches with prepared script we admit it - my last semester in theological seminary I took a course titled "Liturgy As Art"), it reminded me again that not only opera, and theater and cinema, but any number of things of a cultural nature changed during the pandemic; schools and education, business office practices, career and vocational attitudes; awareness that the unseen and unappreciated common laborer who clears tables, washes dishes, picks up trash, empties your garbage is doing honest and honorable work, providing service that is far more essential than what most of us do in life, and entitled to fair wages; outlook on the Time of life itself, and more. During the pandemic people saw life and Time in new ways.

One thing that changed hit us early. Many churches closed to Sunday worship during the pandemic's beginning panic about crowds. As churches reopened, attendance picked up slowly or not at all, and, just as Ross notes about the opera, attendance has not fully returned to previous levels. I'm no sociologist, but we all noticed this early on, wondered when, and then whether, folks would return. It hasn't happened, and I'm puzzling over the reason(s) for it, the drop in attendance. It seems permanent to me.

As we go on, I don't expect attendance to "recover" because things changed and are changing. Staying home Sunday mornings was/is enjoyable, the Sabbath rest fully rationalized. Pandemic rules made it mandatory, so you didn't have to face people asking why you quit going to church, which actually you'd wanted to do for a long Time. Churches started posting worship services live on Facebook and other media, so you could watch from home: you could Say you were watching from home, and if it wasn't true nobody was the wiser. If you wanted to, you could log in with a comment, "Smith family watching" - - I myself have sat up front in my regular chair near the Altar, tuned in to our live service on my smart phone and logged in, "Tom watching." Shortly, you found that you didn't feel guilty about skipping church, as in "who needs it?!" and your new normal imprinted. As with daily exercise, if you miss a few mornings of church, the habit is gone and it's too much trouble to start it back up, and you like the elimination of one more thing to do, and don't want to resume anyway, and it's far more pleasant to stay in bed longer while you sip another mug of hot & black. You can head for the golf course and tell yourself you'll watch church later. It's a cultural shift away from church that was long underway anyway, facilitated by the pandemic. In Time it will affect church finances and churches will shrink, some will close. The rest won't be able to afford a minister, so new arrangements will evolve. It's happening. New experience with new realizations and new expectations, it's permanent, a new normal.

Whatever is normal in our Time was not normal for our parents and will not be normal for our children. Normal is actually always in transition anyway, evolving to whatever comes up next on stage. When I was a boy, normal long distance travel was by bus and train. Now we go by airplane or, convenient and free, we stay home and do it online. More, AI is coming: a student can have his computer prepare his homework and write his essays and term papers. A preacher can have his computer write his sermons, I've not tried that one, but I've heard one, and it was an insipid, innocuous, least common denominator of ubiquitous pious phrases.

Life has its Times and everything changes and keeps on changing. Mine, for a while I loved being a boy, working in a fish market, a student, a naval officer. Then I loved having my own business, with endless travel and freedom, paying clients and no boss but myself; on the side, five or six years as an adjunct college professor; three years as a student again, theological seminary. Then I loved being a full Time parish priest for a chunk of life in a town that's a place of the deepest heart. Back home to PC, I loved working outside on my beloved old school building and making a once in a lifetime friend; teaching middle school kids and being their chaplain, that may have been the best of all Time. Then I loved teaching Sunday school classes and mid-week Bible study gatherings for some years and filling in as part time Helper at my home church. But I'm only a dozen years from a hundred years old, and all that's coming to an end.

My new norm is looking out my Bayside window here in 7H. Predawn coffee on the porch watching Saturday arrive. Loving loved ones. Anticipating mullet and oysters for supper. Most days writing a blog about Life is short and we haven't much Time.

Life is Good. Good, Better, Best, Life Itself is the best of all gifts, Life and Love, and I'm eternally thankful!

RSF&PTL