I have no idea what that phrase—“new normal”—is supposed to mean. Or, perhaps I’m just frustrated with the fact that we have not arrived there and don’t know what to look for when we do or to know we’ve made it. That said, it seems that this week our society has gone back to our old normal, but not in the way you might be imagining. This has nothing to do with COVID-19. We’ve gone back to the old normal in which black people are killed at the hands of white folks, in which another black person has their life ended through violent police action.
“I can’t breathe” is the cry from another black person killed at the hands of police, killed at the hands of white people. This week I, like many of us, have faced in a way that perhaps we hadn’t before the reality of how pervasive racism remains in our country. We like to imagine that when the Civil Rights Acts was written and passed that equality somehow magically appeared. We like to pretend that all lives matter when such a reality isn’t even possible until black lives matter. We like to pretend we are a people that we just simply aren’t. We like to imagine we live in the new normal of true equal rights but if we look around, if we truly learn about and pay attention to the waters we swim in, we will see that that isn’t at all the case.
For too long I have imagined racism as the unfortunate relative that can’t shut up or the person in a white hood. We let ourselves off the hook when that is the only racism we can imagine. We don’t feel like a racist because we aren’t that. And yet, I have spent this week learning about some of the ways racism controls and infects our world and the systems and structures that control everything we do. There’s a lot to learn and it takes all of us to end this kind of racism. I want to invite you to join me in that learning, to join me in those conversations. They will be hard; I and we will be uncomfortable. But, they’ll enable us to do our part to bring about a world where breath and life flow abundantly and everyone can breathe.
This weekend the church celebrates Pentecost, the day when the Holy Spirit is breathed into the world. Spirit and breath in the Hebrew Scriptures are the same Hebrew word. This spirit of God we once again receive on Sunday is the same Spirit that hovered over creation at the beginning, that brought form to the formless, that brought order out of chaos. The Spirit of God renews, restores, generates a creation that bears God’s true image. This breath of God has been stamped and strangled out of too many lives in our world from violence, too many black lives from racism, too many lives.
But God still breathes. God’s spirit still moves and so a new thing is always possible, a new creation is always being made.
May we live in a world in which every lung, every heart, every life is full of breath, inspired by the Spirit of God. May we get to work to bring such a world about. A new normal in which no one ever is forced to barely cough out “I can’t breathe” is a new normal I’ll give my life to bring out. I hope you will too.