Odd

I like work­ing when oth­ers are off. I like to take a day off when oth­ers are work­ing. It is more fun to be out of step with the rest of the world. I also like watch­ing oth­ers in their per­sonal dra­mas. Lately, it has been about vot­ing and foot­ball. They are much the same thing — cheer­ing for one side and pray­ing for the defeat of the other. Either way, half of the peo­ple go home in shame. There is some­thing grandiose about win­ning — even if it is only a vic­ar­i­ous vic­tory. We like to iden­tify with a cham­pion. The real test comes a year from now in pol­i­tics or at the end of the sports sea­son. Can you stand beside a can­di­date that wins but goes on to be an admin­is­tra­tive dis­grace? Do you still have the logo of your favorite team on the back win­dow of your car in a three-win/nine-loss sea­son?
Per­son­ally, I have cast my lot with the ulti­mate los­ing win­ner. Chris­tian­ity is about para­dox­i­cal liv­ing. Its cham­pion was exe­cuted for trumped up rea­sons as a crim­i­nal, but he fooled them all by refus­ing to stay dead. He left his detrac­tors behind and taught his fol­low­ers to do the same. Kings are a dime a dozen in his­tory. Great polit­i­cal eras come and go like TV seri­als. A thou­sand year reign here or there is noth­ing in the light of the greater expanse of time. All worldly vic­to­ries are rel­a­tively short lived. I am care­ful these days not to sign my name to things that do not ulti­mately last. Yes, I live the mis­un­der­stood life of being the “odd man out” — but it has its rewards (trust me on this one).
Friedrich Hegel, a nine­teenth cen­tury philoso­pher, said that our era would be one in which the only hope of hap­pi­ness would be in being some­how in the cen­ter of the cul­tural story — hav­ing the right job, fam­ily, sta­tus, etc. The race would be to be in the cen­ter of the social “norm” so that you are pro­tected by the greater sys­tem. Few peo­ple fit that close to the mid­dle. Those in that cov­eted spot live in fear of being ousted. What a sad way to live!
Liv­ing the cre­atively odd life means fit­ting in and not fit­ting in at the same time. It is about selec­tive con­for­mity. It takes some nerve and deep dis­cern­ment. Any­one can be odd just to be dif­fer­ent. The key is being odd in the right places and at the right time. New Tes­ta­ment writ­ers would allude to this by say­ing things like, “be not con­formed to this world” or “being in the world but not of the world.” Odd that they would say those things…even more odd that they would live them in total joy.