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What is normal? One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest

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  • Despair and Discouragement
  • Discernment, Experience and Enlightenment
  • Faith, Anxiety, Uncertainty and Cowardice
  • Insensibility (Death of soul)
  • Ken Kesey
  • Tradition, learning and education
Mar 27 2020
Post's featued image.

In fact, what is normal in a world in which one flies East, another flies West and another flies over the cuckoo’s nest?

According to the ways of this world, if a normal man (that is, a sinful man) would go into a psychiatric hospital to get rid of the consequences of his sins, what would happen? Wouldn’t he find that caregivers are much more dangerous than the madmen from the asylum? Or could he find out that the inmates are running the asylum?

What is normal? God

Being all created in the image of God, we need God Himself as a model to advance toward His likeness. This state of resemblance is called happiness. The more a man resembles God in union with Him, the happier he is.

However, if the model is missing, then the direction in which we must advance is missing. As a consequence of this, people then behave chaotically, in desperate search for a direction that no longer appears. That is how we are all doomed.

The normality can only be Christ who is our archetype—God who became Man, God incarnate. The Bible is a textbook of normality. We must read the commandments and apply them, in order to avoid being to eternal madness, dictated by our fallen logic. Logic leads us to the assurance that everyone is crazy except ourselves. Is that so?

How to find happiness

Happiness is what is normal, even if the logic of this world tells us that happiness would be something out of the ordinary through its extravagance. Let us have the power of humility to recognize that we are on the wrong path, and return to a normal life, beyond what society presses us to do.

Let us study the Bible to learn what is normal and, beyond that, ask and learn from normal people (that is, from saints) as to what is normal.

But be careful! It takes faith to accept normality in our lives, because we are accustomed to saying that madmen are running the asylum.

Then, we may all recognize what is normal, and we may all fly together for the happiness of union with God.

Based on Ken Kesey

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