Perfectly Normal, Thank You Very Much

“Mr and Mrs Dursley, of number four, Privet Drive, were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much.”

J. K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (1997)

I’m currently reading the first Harry Potter book in Latin.¹ Yes, fine, take a moment now to groan at the surpassing excess of my nerdiness, but you know, I’ve got to keep my Latin going somehow, given that I don’t use it at work or devotionally the way I do my other ancient languages, and since a good friend was kind enough to gift me a copy of Harrius Potter et Philosophi Lapis at the end of last year, I’ve been very much enjoying picking it up at intervals and slowly working my way through the opening chapters. Slowly, because my Latin might be good but it’s not that good, and of course there’s a great deal of unfamiliar vocabulary to contend with in a book set several centuries after Latin ceased to be a living language. Some of my favourites among the author’s coinages include birotula automataria ‘motorbike’ (literally ‘two little wheels acting of themselves’), Ferriviae Subterraneae Londoniensis ‘London Underground’ (literally ‘underground carrying ways of London’), Pedibus Suspensis per Tulipas Eamus ‘Tiptoe Round the Tulips’ (literally ‘we go through the tulips with hesitant feet’), fasciculus frustrorum fragilium ‘crisp packet’ (literally ‘little packet of brittle bits of food’), and sorbillum glaciatum transatlanticum ‘knickerbocker glory’ (which I am really struggling to literally translate; ‘frozen transatlantic sippable thing’ is about as close as I can get).

 

Look, here it is! Such a better cover than the original one...

Still, being forced to read slowly for linguistic reasons has its advantages in that it grants the brain a little more time to mull over the information it’s taking in; often when I read a compelling novel, I find myself devouring the words on the page so quickly that I’m not even registering half of them, so the contrast provided by my progress through Harrius Potter… is not an unwelcome one. I haven’t even got as far as Harry’s entrance into the weird and wonderful world of witchcraft and wizardry yet; at the moment, he still exists in the utterly mundane middle-class realm of Mr and Mrs Dursley of number four, Privet Drive – perfectly normal, thank you very much, and anything that doesn’t fit into that mould can be shoved into the cupboard under the stairs and never spoken of in polite company.

Here’s the thing, though: much as the Dursleys are relentlessly given over to the business of convincing everyone in their acquaintance of how entirely and unshakably normal they are, it really isn’t very normal, having agreed to adopt your orphaned nephew, to despise him, neglect him, and generally treat him as some shameful burden undeserving of the attention, affection, and gifts so liberally lavished on his cousin. In fact, the Dursleys’ single-minded pursuit of total, uninfringed normality leads them to do all sorts of things that are decidedly abnormal. On the car ride to the zoo for Dudley’s birthday trip, for instance, when Harry casually mentions that he had a dream about a flying motorbike, it would have been far more normal for Mr Dursley to have made some mild remark to the effect that that was an interesting dream, than to do what he actually did, which was nearly crash the car, then turn entirely round and yell animalistically in Harry’s direction that motorbikes don’t fly. Later, when Harry’s Hogwarts letters start showing up in ever-increasing numbers, Mr Dursley’s behaviour spirals further and further from anything that could be described as ‘normal’. He sleeps in the hallway to stop Harry sneaking down to seize the next letter when it arrives; he takes a day off work in order to spend his time blocking up the letterbox; he takes another day off to construct yet more elaborate post obstructions; and eventually he compels his entire family to leave the house, with five minutes’ notice and the intention of bunkering down in some remote place where the letters won’t be able to reach them. They end up in a tiny, dilapidated hut on a rocky offshore island,² Mr Dursley being positively gleeful that a storm is predicted that night. ‘Perfectly normal’? Hardly. And we’re given some charming little details that embroider that picture of abnormality all the more: Mr Dursley is so wound up by the whole business that he attempts to use a piece of fruitcake as a hammer, that he jumps at the slightest noise; on the car journey, he continually doubles back on himself, stops in various random secluded locations before deeming them insufficiently remote, and even starts muttering to himself about the need to shake the mysterious letter-senders off their trail. Dudley’s reaction captures the thing beautifully: “Daddy’s gone mad, hasn’t he?”

In short, the Dursleys’ obsession with demonstrating to the world how perfectly normal they are, thank you very much, is the very thing that leads them to behave in such a fashion as to prove themselves thoroughly abnormal. They are so fixated on the result that they should come across as normal, that they are prepared to do all manner of abnormal things in the hope of achieving that result. By striving after the façade of the thing, they forfeit the thing itself. And I do wonder whether this doesn’t apply to most, even all, qualities that we might hold to be virtues worth striving after. I mean, I’ve personally always taken ‘normal’ as an insult rather than an aspiration, but what about other adjectives we might want people to associate with us? What about ‘courageous’ or ‘strong’ or ‘brilliant’?

Well, devoting oneself to coming across as courageous isn’t a courageous thing to do; it’s not courageous to be afraid of something so flimsy and unthreatening as other people’s opinions. And devoting oneself to coming across as strong doesn’t evince strength, because strength doesn’t need to rely on the fickle external condition of other people’s opinions. And devoting oneself to coming across as brilliant – here’s the one that cuts closest for me personally – couldn’t, in actual fact, be more stupid, because real brilliance seeks truth and knowledge regardless of whether or not it aligns with other people’s opinions.

Not to mention, devoting oneself to coming across as righteous is a sure-fire method of proving one’s unrighteousness: “Be on your guard not to practise your righteousness in front of people, so as to be seen by them; otherwise, you will have no reward from your Father in heaven,” and all that.³ Which is a section of scripture I feel I mention disproportionately often on my blog, but then, also one I feel bears the repetition. It’s easy to laugh at the Dursleys and their obsession with coming across as normal, their terror of that façade being shattered if their neighbours should ever somehow find out about their wizarding relatives – but when I think about how much I too am governed by a desire to present myself as having some desirable quality or other, I can see rather more of myself in them than I’d like.

And this is serious business. To strive after the façade of the thing is to forfeit the thing itself; to practise righteousness in front of people is to lose any recognition of righteousness on that count in the eyes of the one whose opinion on the subject actually matters. I’m not saying our status as righteous in Christ is under threat, just to be clear; if you believe that he’s borne your sins and paid for them and irrevocably gifted you his perfection in exchange, then he has, end of. Indeed, it’s only on that foundation that I’m able to exhort you to strive for righteousness at all; without Christ, that would be an entirely futile endeavour. So, having been given what we have, whyever would we devote ourselves to the pursuit of a thing for which there is no lasting reward, a thing the world could have given us anyway, the mere appearance of righteousness? Wouldn’t it be so much better to be governed by pursuit of the thing itself, rather than the façade of it? Wouldn’t it be so much better to seize the opportunity we now have, to attain, however imperfectly in this life, to actual righteousness?

This is a conversation I’ve been having with myself a fair bit lately. I’m so done with living like Mr Dursley, in pursuit of the appearance of the qualities I esteem, rather than the reality of them, and so doomed never to truly attain to the latter. It is staggering, having explicitly made the decision and pleaded God’s help in implementing it, how many times a day I catch myself thinking, oh, but I can’t or I must do that, otherwise so-and-so will think such-and-such about me. And perhaps it’s just me who’s so governed by the desire to come across a certain way, but I doubt it; I dare you to try noticing it in yourself. In this as in everything, though, the best and only weapons we have are the gospel and the scriptures and the presence of God’s Spirit in us – and so I read and I pray and I preach to myself, that my identity is wholly in Christ and nothing else matters, not really. My Father declares me righteous – though only at the cost of the blood of his Son – and that’s the most desirable quality I could ever hope to attain to. I have the real thing, and have only to grow into it; and the less I concern myself with pursuing the mere façade, the more I shall, indeed, grow into it.

Footnotes

¹ If you didn’t know such a thing was obtainable, I hasten to assure you it most certainly is: https://www.hive.co.uk/Product/J-K-Rowling/Harry-Potter-and-the-Philosophers-Stone-Latin--Harrius-Po/16438978.

² ‘Hut on the Rock’ is the name of one of the tracks on the soundtrack album for Harry Potter and the Cursed Child; whatever you might think of the play itself, I enthusiastically recommend the score (written by Imogen Heap, drawing heavily on her own earlier work) if only as good background music for studying: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S3QDBgSoUuA&list=OLAK5uy_m-1B7M6sXjAr4Wf5OTzq9aiYKrbkjEcJE&index=7.

³ Matthew 6 – but you knew that, right? https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=matt+6&version=ESVUK