MASKS OF NORMAL

Aren't we all, Lord, even unto ourselves? Look in the mirror: there's no there there. Only the mask. #lost.

Lord Jesus,

Come closer.

Look at this photograph

Of an L train car interior.

All the transistor transiters, crowded in their orange-paneled seats.

The tunnel whooshing thunderously past the runny liquid dark windows.

So commonplace, wipe a smudge of thick dust, grime,

Isn’t it? So everyday? So normal?

Does it tell you anything about a world gone off the rails?

Change the viewing angle. Try cutting across

Time. Chewing-

Omit the glowing screens in our palms

And watch how the positions of our heads turn

Away from ourselves

And toward each other.

Our faces soften, smiles crinkle,

And our spines take a normal kind of curve,

And aren’t we reading novels

Instead of surfing data streams?

It’s a kind of time travel, isn’t?

Without them, we’re together,

Effortlessly, fundamentally interested in the Real,

Framed for the perceptors your Father made to drive us

As we steward His garden.

But bring them back

Glowing, our drawn-in faces icy blue,

And we become captivated captives

Lured into an endless curling eddies

In the fogs of illusion and delusion

Blanketing us without and within,

Carried away from each other,

And even ourselves,

And into mechanisms which shape our very behaviors and thoughts

With Classical and Operant Conditioning’s wands.

My high school bestie, Andy Huff, used to trumpet, “What is normal?” as an acknowledgement of personality relativity — we all have our own normals, and other people have their own expectations of what our normals are. That pendulum swings wide, and masks a great deal of terrain under the excuses of what is acceptable in normal social situations. But it also excuses a lot that it shouldn’t. Andy was a bacchanalian dilettante in his celebration of what ended up under normal’s umbrella; a glorious pluralism of acceptance and tolerance gave us all license to be. What he missed then is what I see now: normal is dangerous precisely because it equalizes sin and virtue rather than risk hurting the sinner’s feelings for pointing out that, ahem, they’ve sinned. —Ed.

Mammon doesn’t just allow sin; he insulates it from criticism by dissolving the very framework that would call it out. And we defend it, as if comfort were the highest moral principle. —ChatGPT.

Lord Jesus,

When I die,

Presuming I’ve led a viturous life,

Presuming I haven’t sinned too much,

I wouldn’t know

I don’t want to know

I want to trust prayer is enough

Can I bring my iPhone?

Do you have 5G up there?

What’s your WiFi password?

Imagine a scenario in which iPhones are allowed into the afterlife, but only while you’re in Hell. Which would you chose? A Heaven free of iPhone’s distractions and illusions and delusions — and gossip above all — or a Hell you navigate with precisely the same instrument? Shedding your iPhones becomes a spiritual test — can you give them up as scriptural texts? Or will you follow them to Hell? —Ed.

Lord Jesus,

Join me on the feedlot, won’t you?

See the cattle and the little piggies, all lined up

And blindered, like racing horses?

They go where they follow.

Don’t we all.

Of course they stop at every mirror

The trick is to get them to follow the black mirrors they hold in their hands.

What’s at the end of the line, Jesus?

What’s waiting for us for dutifully following?

We were supposed to follow you?

We thought following itself was enough.

The fires crackle and you hear the chains pile with a dusty thud.

What we mistook for Plato’s Cave

Was always something else.

You know they got ahold of what you said, Lord?

You know they lie to us about what you said?

Every Sunday?

Just how it goes

What’s the best of you?

The Preacher knows.

Tighten those blinders.

Don’t deviate from the normal course.

Here comes the slop.

Read the news, eat your nummie nummies.

Eager little piggies.

March 2, 2025, Brandon E. Heckman.