No trouble with Normal

As one of the great Bruce Cockburn's louder songs has it,

Strikes across the frontier and strikes for higher wage
Planet lurches to the right as ideologies engage
Suddenly it's repression, moratorium on rights
What did they think the politics of panic would invite?
Person in the street shrugs -- "Security comes first"
But the trouble with normal is it always gets worse
The trouble with normal is it always gets worse.

This Thursday is the twentieth anniversary of the Tienanmen Square massacre, when the forces of the Chinese government gunned down hundreds, possibly thousands of pro-democracy activists in Beijing. It is an event I shall never forget; a pivotal moment when a certain kind of hope died. Like many other people I wrote a furious letter to the Chinese embassy straight afterwards; a pathetic and futile gesture, no doubt, but perhaps slightly better than no gesture at all.

Since then, I have deliberately never visited the country (maybe they wouldn't let me in anyway, after that letter), and once turned down an informal offer of a job that would have required me to do so. In the two decades since the massacre, the Chinese economy has grown enormously and begun to wreak environmental havoc even more effectively than other countries that have doing so much longer; and everyone seems to behave as if things are "normal" most of the time, despite occasional publicity about Tibet. There was talk after the massacre about the "mandate of Heaven" which Chinese rulers are traditionally supposed to possess; a mandate that Heaven can withdraw if the rulers exceed certain limits of despotism. If so, Heaven seems to be taking its time.

Another, related anniversary passed yesterday: that of the death in 1972 of Watchman Nee, after twenty years imprisonment for his faith by the same Chinese state apparatus who later sent the tanks into Tienanmen Square. Nee was a Christian writer and church leader whose legacy is a series of quite wonderful books. His best-known is "The Normal Christian Life": a life that "normal" not in the sense of what is "usual" among Christians, but of what is "normative", and actually rather rare. It is nothing less than the life of Christ himself expressed in the life of the individual believer. Nee's message: God has done it all through the death and resurrection of Christ, and our job is not to try to live a good life by our own efforts but to step aside and let him live his life through us. We are in Christ, and Christ is in us.

Unlike the kind of "normal" that, as Cockburn observes, only gets worse, Nee's "Normal", like the life it describes, only gets better. I first read the book thirty years ago and it made a huge impression on me then, though I don't think I really "got it" even so. Recently I reacquired a copy and found to my amazement that I'd only ever read, or at least only remembered, the first half. The second half goes still deeper. I've just started another, less well-known book of his, "The Spiritual Man", which is even better; a treasure beyond price, and all the more amazing for the fact that he was still in his twenties when he wrote it (in 1928, so he can perhaps be forgiven for the not very inclusive title).

I haven't really tried to express here what Nee actually says. That task is well beyond me, but fortunately I don't have to attempt it, because both books are available free on line; just click the links above. When you've read them, you might want to check in back here, as I expect to be blogging about Nee's writings more in the future.