Not Normal People

I’ve always wanted to be considered what you might call a normal person. You know, someone you can talk to at the grocery store; a guy who could sit next to you at a Colts game and scream at the appropriate moments; a music fan who can name the drummer in his favorite band, and who enjoys a great movie from time to time. In other words, I’d love to be someone who isn’t dramatically different, or off center socially or emotionally.

Of course, some people would say I already have a big strike against me. I’m a professional minister. A pastor may be defined as that person who can come into a party and change everybody else’s conversation in mid-sentence (“I’ll tell you the punch line later,” somebody usually whispers).

As a kid I was pretty sure the pastor at my church went to bed at 8:00 p.m. after a tall, cold glass of milk. I didn’t want to be that person. I want to be normal.

The problem is that I also aspire to be a saint. Here I am using the word “saint” in its broadest New Testament sense: a man or woman who trusts in God through Jesus, and through whom God is willing to accomplish great things in the world. The difficulty is that what we learn from history is that real life saints are, well, different.

Historian Donald Spoto cautions his readers that actual saints are “not normal people.” In fact, they can seem flat-out weird. An excellent case in point is Francis, a young man from the Italian village of Assisi who in the early 1200’s lived what most agree is one of the three or four most remarkable human lives ever observed.

Francis started out with everything going for him, at least the way we customarily define the Good Life. He was the spoiled son of a rich merchant. His teenage buddies nicknamed him rex convivii, which might be loosely translated, “king of the party animals.” He fancied himself a knight and managed to get himself thrown into a dank dungeon as a POW for more than a year. He was ultimately freed from prison, only to return to a life of aimlessness.

But on a warm summer day in 1205, Francis’ life changed forever. In the ruins of an abandoned chapel he heard the call of God: “Francis, don’t you see my house is being destroyed? Go, then, rebuild it for me.” In an event that he could never quite put into words, Francis gave himself to a life of selfless service. He forsook his family’s ample possessions, preferring to wear a simple peasant’s tunic.

As historian Thomas Cahill puts it, “His colorless vagrant’s costume would become the uniform of the early Franciscans, the world’s first hippies.”

To say that his straight-laced, stick-to-the-predictable-path father was disappointed by this turn of events is to put it mildly. Francis was escorted to the public square, where his father could beat some sense into him. This would be a public service beating, one that would provide a warning to any other boys in town who might thumb their noses at common sense. But in a dramatic symbolic gesture, Francis stripped off his clothes and returned them to his father. From now on he would answer only to his “Father in heaven.”

Francis’ life, compromised by malaria and personal deprivations, lasted but a short 44 years. But in that time his sincerity of heart and commitment to the same gracious attitude to every person, friend or foe – “May the Lord give you peace” – revolutionized Europe and the flow of Western history. He had but one aim: to obey the teachings of Jesus as he understood them. By doing so, he fulfilled the call he had heard on that hot summer day: He helped rebuild the faltering Medieval Church.

I think I’m like most people. I imagine Francis of Assisi and (more recently) Mother Teresa of Calcutta to be splendid aberrations. How wonderful to live in a world with such extraordinary human beings. But God cannot possibly want me to live a life that strays so far from the norm.

Lately it’s occurred to me that my understanding of what is normal has not served me well. For me, “normality” has been defined as a limited commitment to Jesus – one that wouldn’t compromise my relationships with friends and neighbors. I don’t want to shut down conversation at parties, for goodness sake. Francis, on the other hand, humbly assumed that normality for a follower of Jesus would mean taking the Master seriously: speaking, thinking, and acting as Jesus would.

It’s likely that our love affair with normality is what costs most of us the chance to be extraordinary. We become afraid to take risks. We tremble at being thought different. We hope and pray that our children live normal lives, thereby limiting their imagination of courageous, counter-cultural ways of being – ones that might actually turn the world upside-down.

I’m not saying that everyone is called to be a Francis or a Teresa. Theirs is a drama reserved for the very few. But make no mistake: Faithfulness in the smallest of commitments changes reality – every time we seek peace instead of payback, every time we extend grace to strangers, every time we choose integrity over duplicity, every time we say “May the Lord give you peace” instead of venting our frustration.

The hinge is small on which history turns. What we learn from real life saints is that our next words or actions might make, quite literally, all the difference in the world.