While we were attending to the burial of my mother-in-law a few weeks ago, we were welcomed to stay with an old high school friend of my wife and her husband. It was in a beautiful rural area of Mississippi and we got along like bread and butter, but I was a little bit startled at one of the last things the husband said to me as we were leaving: “Fred, you are an unusual person.” At least I think that is what he said. Maybe it was “interesting,” but if that, I still took it to mean unusual. I replied that he was too, giving back to him his meaning, whatever that might have been, and all was right, but it got me to thinking: what is an unusual person? How do we define that?
To begin with, I asked my wife if she thought I was unusual. She said “No, just …… up.” It was, I presumed, a joke, but I couldn’t stop. After that non-answer (I hope), I started going through people we knew, asking “Is he unusual? How about her?” and so on until it dawned on me that there were at least two criteria for “unusual”: the outward presentation and the deeper, more private person. After doing it this way, it became clear that some people, at least as far as we know, might present themselves as normal but be unusual, then vice-versa, then normal/normal, then unusual/unusual, for a total of four possibilities, just like those genetic boxes we used to draw for eye color and so on. Continuing with the genetic model, it might be that “normal” is dominant, but then again, that might only account for the “normal on the outside, unusual on the inside” side of the equation.
So we moved on down a list of friends and family members keeping the inner/outer orientation in mind. Along the way, it did occur to me that this was more of a Rorschach test of ourselves than anything else, but let me leave that for a moment. Rather, the more we got into it, the more nuanced it got. Yes, there were those who were, to us, clearly unusual/unusual, and others who were normal/normal, but those increasingly had to be put into context. For instance, a normal accountant would be a highly unusual football professional; a normal priest an abnormal bartender, a bouncer an abnormal ballet dancer, a cop an abnormal socialist activist, and so on. From some perspectives, then, the issue became cloudy. I determined for myself, for instance, that although I might be unusual for a carpenter, I am pretty ordinary for an academic and writer, making me initially unusual, but really normal, even – sigh - bland. Maybe.
Obviously, we have to question everything here, but it also became fairly clear that some people were simply unusual, even whacky, no matter what the profession, just as some people were inherently normal regardless of the profession. On the one hand, we might consider that certain professions draw unusual people, making the normal undertaker, for instance, pretty unusual in a mixed crowd, but not always. On the other hand, we might agree that some people were simply unbalanced or marching to a different drummer whether they were part of a New Orleans transvestite dance troupe or a member in good standing of the Pipe Fitters Union - all in all making this kind of categorization very complex and almost endlessly nuanced.
Certainly such considerations are subjective, making this a personality test of the judger as well, something that could only be corrected by a sampling of a much larger, randomized group of judges. How many would think that the entertainer Prince was an unusual fellow? How about George W. Bush? Then we must ask the truly complex question: Why? Was Prince unusual for his androgynous style, his music, his drug addictions, or his overall personality? Did we really know his personality? And what about Bush’s secret artsy side? So on and on it goes.
Easter has just passed, and if one keeps up with the daily readings on the Catholic calendar, Monday after Easter is the day that Mary Magdalene walks to the tomb, only to find two angels in it, but no Jesus. She turns to find someone who she thinks is the gardener and asks him if he might know where the body has been taken. With a few words, her vision clears and she sees that is it Jesus himself standing in front of her, not a gardener. As we are told, it was then that she saw Jesus for who he is, just as the three apostles saw Jesus before the Resurrection in his glorified body during his transfiguration on Mount Tabor.
His glorified body: what is it? It cannot be a mere outward presentation to the group, nor a reflection of privately held quirks. So then what?
It occasionally happens that I am brought to see a part of my personality that I had not known existed. Some of these configurations have not been pleasant to witness, but some have seemed like a reflection of a personal transfiguration, a vision of the soul that is the very BEST I could be, bestowing on me something like the characteristics of a wise and genuine saint. This informs me, and I think all of us, that many aspects of the self are somehow hidden, even to the private self. Now, I understand why the uglier, even nasty, images might be tucked away by the subconscious, but why would we hide our better aspects from any level of self or society? It is true that we are not doing this consciously, just as many of our prosaic private quirks are not hidden consciously but from psychological habit, but this is different. The better part should be extoled by the society at large, so why hide them?
The reason must be that this glorified self that we probably all share would NOT be extoled by society at large, but rather make us extremely, even dangerously, unusual. On the surface of it, Jesus was killed for the blasphemy of suggesting that he was the son of God, but we know well from the New Testament that the Jewish powers-that-be despised him for exposing their hypocrisy, something that many had not realized about themselves before. Here we witness the fury of men who carefully conceal elements of themselves, only to be exposed as if they had been caught in bed with another man’s wife. Such humiliation of people in power will never go unpunished.
So it would be with us. So it is that we hide ourselves from this best-version-of-ourselves with all our might. Some cannot do it so well, just as some cannot hide their other quirks either, and these are the people we would call unusual. Those who cannot control the best or the worst of themselves we either constrain in public institutions, relegate to street-life, or publicly mock and effectively destroy. And while some traits simply must be tamed for any society to continue, our better sides are muffled because they would rock the boats of those who feel confident, even superior, in their social facades.
We Christians are told all the time that we will eventually suffer for our beliefs if we actually profess them and act upon them. For most of us, this is not a problem, because we have spent so much of our lives sculpting our inner selves for the outer world (and for ourselves) that to stray from our script is almost an impossibility. As in most great undertakings, to take that leap from our practiced self to something greater requires faith. It also requires us to reject the ego-salves that we have been handed by our social/cultural/political milieu. Tough stuff to do.
Back in Mississippi, I did not want to be called ‘unusual,’ at least without a positive modifier like “unusual in your vast intellect,” because I did not want to be seen as the one chicken in the flock who gets pecked to death. It is a natural reaction to the world as it is. We fight other, more acknowledged temptations stemming from our biological natures as well, but the fear of being ‘unusual’ is the most hidden and perhaps the most powerful obstacle we must overcome before we can become truly unusual in the best possible way. To do so requires the faith that this self is really there, and the courage of the martyrs who stepped from the edge of mere self to realize their cosmic identities.
[Note: I will not be posting another essay until sometime in the first week of May. FK]
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