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

Period Drama

Jen:    I’m sorry; I’m just a little bit … you know.

Roy:   What?

Jen:    Well, I’ve got, you know, at the moment, so…

Moss: What?

Jen:    I’ve got Aunt Irma visiting.

Moss: Oh, do you not like Aunt Irma? I’ve got an aunt like that.

Jen:    It’s my term for my time of the month.

Roy:   Oh.

Moss: What time of the month? The weekend?

Jen:    No.

Moss: Does Aunt Irma visit on the weekend?

Roy:   Moss –

Jen:    You know, it’s high tide.

Moss: But we’re not on the coast.

Roy:   Moss –

Jen:    I’m closed for maintenance.

Moss: Closed for maintenance?

Roy:   Moss –

Jen:    I’ve fallen to the Communists.

Moss: Well, they do have some strong arguments.

The IT Crowd S1 E6, ‘Aunt Irma Visits’ (2006)

 

Turns out it’s really hard to find stock photos of period-related paraphernalia. So I took one of my own. Sadly the lighting is terrible.

One of the questions I often find myself asking about fiction in which young women play active and dynamic and heroic roles is what our intrepid heroines do about menstrual hygiene in the perilous situations and inhospitable environments in which they so frequently tend to find themselves. No, but seriously: what’s a girl to do if she gets her period while competing in the Hunger Games, say, or midway through an epic trek through the underworld, or stranded on a deserted alien planet? The matter is virtually never alluded to. In fact, one of the few stories I can think of in which it is explicitly treated, was actually written by a man. Here Lies Arthur by Philip Reeve is a novel take on the King Arthur legend whose chief interest is in the power of storytelling to shape people’s beliefs and actions;¹ the protagonist, Gwyna, spends much of her childhood posing as a boy, which inevitably brings some confrontation of gender issues into the narrative from time to time. Once he deems it infeasible to keep up the pretence any longer, Gwyna’s mentor Myrddin entrusts her to the care of a family he knows in order that she might be properly trained for womanhood, but one thing they forget to tell her about is menstruation; so when she wakes up one night in a pool of her own blood, she immediately panics, and supposes she must be dying, until her new companions calm her down and explain. Later in the story, Gwyna spends some time disguised as a man again, and one of her concerns about doing so is how she’s going to be able to keep it up without anyone’s suspicions being aroused at her spending some time each month washing a number of inexplicably bloodstained rags. The matter reached, as I recall, no further than these couple of asides during the course of the novel, but it didn’t need to. Mr. Reeve had the presence of mind to realise that his protagonist would realistically have periods, and the consideration to take the trouble to imagine how they might affect her life and its events as he invented them. I commend him for such consideration, and I appreciated its effect.

Because we might not like it very much, but the fact is that having periods does have some substantial effect on a woman’s life. Much as they loved to tell us in those single-sex PSHE lessons at school that we shouldn’t ever let our periods stop us from doing what we want to do, it simply isn’t terribly convenient to be involuntarily leaking blood from one’s loins for a few days every month. Given the choice, it would be far more pleasant and straightforward just not to have to deal with the necessity of buying sufficient supplies of pads and tampons,² the terrifying possibility that they might prove unequal to their task (perhaps even, heaven forbid, in public),³ the hassle of extra laundry should they indeed prove to be so.⁴ That’s not stuff I imagine any of us would be eagerly signing up to have included in our lives. Nor is it at all convenient, furthermore, to be beset by whichever of the assortment of related symptoms one’s lucky enough to experience: mine aren’t too bad, typically limited to a persistent dull ache in the abdomen, a reduction in my body’s ability to regulate its own temperature properly, and the same general feeling of mild unwellness that might be achieved by a slight cold, but I know, and know of, women who suffer far worse from Aunt Irma’s monthly visits than my fortunate self.⁵

My point, then, is that periods really suck. And the modern world’s message of female empowerment, as highly commendable and equally highly needed as it may be, often seems to skate over that fact, presumably for fear that recognition of it might insinuate female weakness. Frequently, as in the fiction I alluded to above, this skating is done by neglecting to mention the matter at all. Such an approach must surely imply either that periods are not fit to be talked about in mainstream discourse – an old notion that our society is, wisely, in the process of shedding – or that they’re simply not a big enough deal to warrant their being mentioned, which, given the last paragraph, you’ll gather I really don’t buy. Periods are, if you’ll forgive me, bloody annoying. And I take some substantial comfort that this state of affairs is in no way ignored, but rather acknowledged and accounted for, by the Bible.

Leviticus 15 – appealingly titled ‘Laws About Bodily Discharges’ by the ESV translators – details the state of uncleanness in which an Israelite woman is to exist for the course of her period.⁶ (The first half of the chapter is about men, by the way, just in case you thought you caught a whiff of sexism there.) Significantly, uncleanness is not just a physical situation: “And you shall separate the children of Israel from their uncleanness, and they shall not die in their uncleanness, in their defiling my tabernacle, which is in their midst,” sums up the antepenultimate verse of the chapter. If the Israelites are not properly separated from their uncleanness in the manner described, they’ll be guilty of defiling the site of God’s presence among them. But why? A woman can hardly help having her period, can she? Why should it threaten to make her guilty of something?

Well, let’s jump back a few pages to chapter 12. Here are detailed the laws for purification after childbirth; the first instruction goes thus: “A woman, when she conceives and bears a male, shall be unclean seven days; as the days of her (menstrual) impurity, she shall be unclean.”⁷ So there’s an explicit analogy drawn here between the uncleanness of being on one’s period, and the uncleanness of childbirth. Physically, the logic of the analogy is obvious, since some loss of blood during childbirth and for some two to four weeks afterwards, possibly longer, is apparently part and parcel of the childbearing process;⁸ but here again there’s a spiritual dimension. After her purifying period is completed, the new mother is to bring offerings to the tabernacle, a burnt offering and a sin offering, and the priest is to make atonement for her with them.

 

A lamb and a pigeon if she could afford it, two pigeons if she couldn’t.

A sin offering? Atonement? But again, what’s she done wrong? Didn’t God actually command human beings to multiply on more than one occasion already?⁹ How, then, is she being disobedient? And certainly he did; and certainly she isn’t – but think about what the whole messy business of childbirth is and represents. It’s the part of the curse for that original disobedience of our first ancestors that God applied specifically to the woman: “I will certainly make great your pain and your conception; in pain shall you bear children.”¹⁰ Now, what God had earlier said was that the prescribed punishment for eating from the forbidden tree, was death, and if we’re not to suppose him a liar, then indeed it must have been – but on a spiritual rather than a physical level, because the two humans quite obviously continued living for some time after the day in which they ate. The curse of painful childbearing, then, was a kind of alternative curse, a softer sentence decided on by the merciful Judge, who could justly have ended their physical lives that very day as well.¹¹ It in some sense stands for death. And more than that, the new certainty of impending death necessitated the bringing forth of new generations to replace their ancestors. Childbirth only exists because humans are sinful and therefore bound to die. And the periods that testify to one’s fitness for childbearing, therefore, also only exist because humans are sinful and therefore bound to die. They are a bloody reminder, month after month, that death and decay are written into who we are, and that only God’s mercy to soften the sentence allows any of us to live at all. No wonder, then, that they’re so painful and annoying: I’d propose that that was very deliberate on God’s part.

I don’t think the medium of blood is an accident, either. The big thing we know about blood from the Bible is that it is representative of life¹² – which makes sense, right, because if you let all the blood out of something, it dies. The shedding of blood means death. Periods, then, really could not be more obviously representative of death if they tried.

In this light, it makes perfect sense that they are dealt with, in the Law, in terms of sin, and of the threat of death. It’s not that a woman who bleeds vaginally has actually thereby done something wrong, but that the bleeding is a testimony to the inherent deathbound sinfulness of her human nature. And what, after all, was the Law for, if not to make clear to those who read it that they were innately sinful and so incapable of pleasing God and obtaining the right to life by their own deeds?¹³

But of course, that’s not the end of the story. Through childbirth, curse as it was, God began and multiplied a people for himself, and eventually from that people brought forth one who would undo every curse of death and sin. Jesus was born of a human mother; she bled just like the rest of us do; she made her offerings at the Temple for her postpartum purification according to the Law. Only, when her son then went on to die, the blood he shed was for the establishment of a new covenant, for the covering of every human sin. This was not just another manifestation of the curse running its course, but the carrying out of its full extent – no alternative soft sentence here – on him who was God, and sinless, and possessor of life in himself. At Calvary, the curse was exhausted; there’s none of it left to be carried out on us any more.

Of course, while we’re still in the flesh, the cycle of death and birth marches on, and we still get our periods, and they still really suck. But the reminder they contain can now be of more cheering things than merely our own sinfulness and consequent mortality. The present creation groans as in labour, and one day all pain will be forgotten at the brilliance of the birth of a whole new creation. The perishable will make way, not for just one more perishable generation, but for the imperishable. We were sinful and bound for death, but that’s not who we are any more, not since Christ took the curse in our place. We are really, truly separated from our uncleanness now.

I’m not sure it’s going too far, then, to call periods a loose type of the cross. The shedding of blood, the carrying out of the curse of Eden, declares the possibility of a new birth; sounds like the cross, right? What a satisfactory view of the matter, that neither disdains periods as too shameful to speak of, nor tries to pretend that they aren’t impactfully unpleasant. But even if you’d rather not follow me that far, I hope that I’ve given you a few God-glorifying directions in which you might lead your thoughts the next time you get your period, supposing that you, O Appreciated Reader, are a woman of childbearing age (and if you’re not, might I add, then well done for not squeamishly recoiling at this post’s subject-matter and for even reading as far as this). Periods really suck, and they’re supposed to, but they, like the death they represent, belong to the present order and the curse under which it sits; we, meanwhile, by the mercy of God, look forward to the birth of what is deathless.

Footnotes

¹ It’s a good ’un, as you can tell from the fact that I read it over ten years ago and many of the details have still stayed with me. Here it is on Hive if you’d like a copy: https://www.hive.co.uk/Product/Philip-Reeve/Here-Lies-Arthur/19909147.

² Or, I should add, whichever alternative menstrual hygiene products you may prefer. Personally, I like to get nice organic cotton pads when I can: https://www.natracare.com/.

³ Surely I’m not the only one out there who’s actually prayed, while staying at someone else’s house, that I wouldn’t get blood all over that person’s spare bedlinen?

⁴ Tip: bloodstains come out better if you spend the time before the sullied garment goes in the washing machine soaking it in cold water.

⁵ The IT Crowd is an excellent sitcom and yes I will take this opportunity to heartily recommend it, thank you: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8w9eoZtnJSA.

⁶ Check it out: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=lev+15&version=ESVUK.

⁷ And again: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=lev+12&version=ESVUK. If you’re frowning at the fact that a baby girl requires double the length of purification time that a baby boy does, I’d suggest accounting for that by the fact that the boy is circumcised at the end of those seven days: circumcision’s a purification-y sort of action, so it would make sense that it reduces the amount of purification time required.

⁸ Thanks to Baby Center for that bit of info: https://www.babycenter.com/0_postpartum-normal-bleeding-and-discharge-lochia_11722.bc. Four weeks is, of course, well within the forty days prescribed in the Torah for purification from bearing a male child.

⁹ Check Genesis 1:28, 9:1, and, with application to Israel specifically, 35:11. Fun fact: the next instance of the word for ‘multiply’ after 1:28 is in the curse of childbearing that I’ll go on to quote (though I’ve translated it ‘make great’ there because I think that works better in context, even though it doesn’t betray the allusion).

¹⁰ You know this chapter, of course: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=gen+3&version=ESVUK.

¹¹ Consider 1 Timothy 2’s “she will be saved through childbearing” in this regard: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=1+tim+2&version=ESVUK.

¹² Try Genesis 9:4; Leviticus 17:11, 14; and Deuteronomy 12:23. Then chase that into the New Testament and you’ll land on John 6:53-54. Isn’t this jazz incredible? Isn’t it incredible what Jesus has made himself to us?

¹³ That was rhetorical. Go and read Romans.