Ascension - The New Normal

A Message as London Area Chaplain of the Sea Cadets on Ascension Day

The lockdown has been long and difficult, especially for those whose homes are uncomfortable or unsafe or full of people of three generations squeezed into a flat or small house. We are all missing the ability to mix together. There is a sense of time flying past and opportunities being missed. The usual patterns of life are being disrupted. We all hope there is a little bit of light at the end of the tunnel, but it is hard, and perhaps especially for young people. Thank you for bearing with it. It is making a difference. Fewer people have died because of the lockdown and others have been protected from becoming ill in the first place. Thank you for the sacrifices you are making. Now is possibly the most difficult time to stick with it, but do keep it up. It takes courage but it is helping.

None of those brave words mean that it is easy. School has been disrupted and many people have lost their jobs or found themselves on reduced income. Some of you may be missing promotions; training that there won’t be an opportunity to do again; precious months that don’t come back. Those of you who are people of Faith will be finding that festivals are being disrupted. For instance, Muslims will have found that the Ramadan has been very different this year, and Jewish communities looking forward to Shavout will be celebrating very differently. Christians have found that the various festivals and pilgrimages which characterise the Christian celebration of Eastertide have been cancelled.

What is not cancelled is the call to love God and to love neighbour. That has been carrying on in all sorts of ways ranging from the continued work of the charitable activities of so many communities to the simple the heroic actions of those who have worked in dangerous circumstances from hospitals to post rooms and from care homes to supermarkets. And you: as I wrote before, you contribute by simply keeping the rules of social distancing.

There have been some upsides as well, in this beautiful spring. For me it's just been extraordinary to see the Thames usually so filled with craft completely quiet. I was out for my morning walk one day and saw a seal under the Millennium bridge.

But we want it all to be over. What is becoming clearer is that even when it won’t be back to normal; it will be a new normal. It’s always the way when things change; whether we move school or move home or job or in later life when we face bereavement or loss or change of any kind there is a new normal. The followers of Jesus faced a new normal when Jesus died. When he rose from the dead it all seemed wonderful and strange, but then it changed again because instead of staying with them he ascended into heaven. Ascension Day will be celebrated on Thursday 21 May. His followers went to a safe house and locked the doors because they were afraid they would be rounded up and executed. Nine days later on the Jewish feast of Pentecost (Shavout) they were still hiding up. They had an experience which Christians describe as the coming of the Holy Spirit. They felt inspired to go out and preach and begin the activity which we recognise today as the life of the Church.

It was a new normal. They didn’t get their old life back. They didn’t have Jesus with them in the same way as before. But just because it was new and different did not mean that it was bad, indeed they came to think the new normal was better because they believed that Jesus was with them in a whole new way.

Whether you believe in the gift of the Holy Spirit or celebrate Pentecost or any other festival or not, we are going through a series of sometimes difficult changes and soon we will all be facing a new normal. Looking back with sorrow and nostalgia at the past does not help. But looking back with thanksgiving for what we had and using that to help us to live in a new way will inspire us to grow into whatever it is that lies ahead of us . Some of it will be very different. We will have lost some things and gained some others. But much will be the same: people will still be kind and difficult, we will still need our values of moral courage; self discipline; honesty and integrity; commitment, and they will guide and help us create the new normal just as much as they guided us in the old normal.

We hope that soon we will be able to gather and parade together. We hope that we will be able to take up our activities once more on the water and on land. But it will be a new normal. The message for us all is that a new normal can and will be just as good, even better, than what we have known before.