Embracing Your Inner Weird
By Brother David
I’m weird.
I get told that by people I know. It used to bother me. I used to think, “How can I unweird myself?”
I like science fiction. I also like horror stories and films—the bloodier the better. The “Hell Raiser” series is awesome. I cry at chick flicks and tear up at some commercials. There is no such thing as “reality TV” (and that includes the news).
Serial killers fascinate me. I have a collection of stuffed animals and toys.
I rescue slugs and worms from the middle of our road.
I believe that Sun Moon Star, by Kurt Vonnegut and Ivan Chermayeff, is one of the best Christmas books ever written. I love “Paradise Lost” and have read it—voluntarily—several times. Goodnight Moon is brilliant. I love history (13th century and earlier) and intensely dislike historical fiction. Pride and Prejudice is a terrific novel; Pride and Prejudice and Zombies is even more terrificker. I love studying grammar and syntax and am something of a stickler for correct grammar and syntax.
I can’t stand lamb or duck or goose or pork. I like cold cuts and pâté. Turkey actually makes me sick. Game meat, such as venison, is awful. Chicken? Breast meat only; slightly dry, thank you very much. Beef? I can deal with ground beef and actually like meatloaf. Steak is out. Roast beef only if it is very thinly sliced and very well done—any pink and I’m outta there. If we were meant to eat red (or pink) bloody meat, God wouldn’t have made fire. I look at “properly cooked” prime rib and think, “All that sucker needs is a bunch of band-aids and a defibrillator and it could walk out of here.”
Yet, as one person I know and love, regularly points out, I love sushi. And while I love sushi, I cannot abide undercooked fish. I really like Mrs. Paul’s™ fish sticks.
I disapprove of the existence of raisins in particular and dried fruit in general.
Kozy Shack™ chocolate pudding proves the existence of God. So do dill pickles.
I dislike watermelon. While I like apples in tarts and pies, I don’t like baked apples, and raw apples are even worse. I have been known to pick watermelon and apples out of fruit salad.
All-natural peanut butter, strawberry jam, American or cheddar cheese, and iceberg lettuce on whole wheat bread is a great sandwich. So is Hershey’s™ chocolate syrup and Jif™ peanut butter on Wonder Bread™ smashed flat. Mayonnaise on anything is dreadful at worst and barely tolerable at best, although I like egg salad made with Hellman’s™ Real mayonnaise. But the eggs have to be very coarsely chopped.
Except for up and down, and backwards and forwards, I have absolutely no sense of direction, which often includes right and left, and my fear of getting lost borders on the phobic. One of my (ironic) nicknames is GPS. I love to drive roads that I don’t know, especially at night.
I like Fox News and regularly vote Democrat.
Do I contradict myself?
Very well, then, I contradict myself;
(I am large—I contain multitudes.) (Walt Whitman: “Song of Myself” 51)
Jesus was weird, too.
Jesus was an observant Jew who ate with tax collectors and sinners. He consorted with women. He healed a servant for a Roman officer. He touched lepers. He cursed a fig tree because it didn’t have fruit—out of season. People just didn’t do things like that. That’s not what normal people did.
Even in his teaching he was weird. In the story of the publican and the Pharisee, it’s the company man, the Pharisee, the man who did everything according to the rules, the conformist whom Jesus condemns. Jesus keeps coloring outside the lines.
He angered and annoyed the authorities. He broke the rules—all the rules that said how a prophet and man of God were supposed to be. He healed people on the Sabbath. He called God his father. He kept stepping over the line. He kept being himself. Unapologetically. The Japanese have a saying: “The nail that sticks up will be hammered down.” And that’s what happened to Jesus. He stuck up too much and so he was hammered down by being nailed to a cross.
Isn’t that what we do? We preach diversity and tolerance and urge individuality. Don’t we say, with Mao Tse Dong, “[Let] a hundred flowers blossom and a hundred schools of thought contend”? And then, like him, don’t we execute many of those who put forth ideas and behaviors different from our own? Because, after all, we know what constitutes normal, acceptable behavior and thought: us. (Actually: me.) And we know who has to be hammered down: them. (And frequently: you.)
But sometimes it happens, in the cold light of aloneness when certain awarenesses hover about on the edge of consciousness like a hangover just waiting to happen, that we recognize that all of our claims to normalcy, to unweirdness, are all just a little, well—weird? We see the inconsistencies in our lives. We note how our values and behaviors don’t synch up. And suddenly it can rush in that it’s not that everyone is out of step with me but that I’m out of step with everyone else. And we find ourselves disconcerted, abashed. We may even have to admit that, somehow, we are weird.
It’s worth looking at 2 Corinthians 12:1-10 (ESV version) here. Paul says:
I must go on boasting. Though there is nothing to be gained by it, I will go on to visions and revelations of the Lord. I know a man in Christ who fourteen years ago was caught up to the third heaven—whether in the body or out of the body I do not know, God knows. And I know that this man was caught up into paradise—whether in the body or out of the body I do not know, God knows—and he heard things that cannot be told, which man may not utter. On behalf of this man I will boast, but on my own behalf I will not boast, except of my weaknesses though if I should wish to boast, I would not be a fool, for I would be speaking the truth; but I refrain from it, so that no one may think more of me than he sees in me or hears from me. So to keep me from becoming conceited because of the surpassing greatness of the revelations, a thorn was given me in the flesh, a messenger of Satan to harass me, to keep me from becoming conceited. Three times I pleaded with the Lord about this, that it should leave me. But he said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” Therefore I will boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may rest upon me. For the sake of Christ, then, I am content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and calamities. For when I am weak, then I am strong.
Ok, weird. Before you get all weird on me about calling this weird, consider this: if you had never read this before or didn’t know that it was from Saint Paul, and your co-worker or the person behind the checkout counter started in on this, what would you think? Yeah.
Paul knows that what he is saying is outlandish. He knows that people are going to look at him as either extraordinary (weird) or simply whacked out (also weird). So he talks about that infamous thorn: something in him that keeps him grounded. Was it physical? Psychological? Moral? We’ll probably never find out—at least on this side of the grave. But it was something that was significant to him, something that was, in its own way, disconcerting. “Therefore I will boast more gladly of my weaknesses” is an embracing of all of it: all of the neat, cool stuff as well as the gnarly, uncomfortable stuff, along with the stuff that just doesn’t make a lot of sense as well as the stuff that we really don’t want even God to see. He embraces it all and says, “This is me! No matter what you say or what you do or how you praise or insult—this is me!”
So, taking Paul as an example, we don’t unweird ourselves. We can’t. Rather, we stand before God and say, “This is me. This is the sum total of everything that has conspired to bring me to where I am today. I offer me to you.” And all of that awesomeness, inconsistency, strangeness, and, yes, even sin is received by God, who is so weird as to create quarks, leptons, and Higgs bosons, who receives us and divinizes the whole shebang. We have no clue what that means—which makes us all the weirder for wanting it.
Walt Whitman wrote:
I believe in you, my Soul, the other I am must not abase itself to you;
And you must not be abased to the other. (“Song of Myself” 5)
We look upon each other with profound respect and regard when we understand this, not because we say to ourselves, “Well, I’m (possibly) just as messed up, too, and people in glass houses…,” but rather because we realize that each and every person can say:
It was you who created my inmost being, who fashioned me in my mother’s womb.
I praise you for all these mysteries, for the wonder of myself and all your works.
You know me through and through, from having watched me take shape, as I was being formed in secret, being knit together in the depths of the earth.
Your eyes have followed all the stages of my life; they are all recorded in your book.
All my days were listed and determined before one of them came to be.
How weighty your thoughts seem to me, O God, how deep their meaning! (Psalm 139:13-17)
Amen.
