The woman was complaining and I had no time for it. The complainer (who had a name like "Stardust") and I were standing in a crowded room at a roach-infested shelter for homeless women. I had been working at the shelter a few months, developing and implementing a program of life skills for women who had lost everything, including themselves. Stardust had arrived at the shelter straight out of a twelve-month stay behind bars. I was tired, groaning inwardly as I ignored her until she became so insistent that I had to look at her.
Two Souls
Suddenly, everything physical fell away. In a split second, we were bodiless, she and I. Since this kind of thing had never happened to me before--and has never happened since--I can only describe it as entering another level of consciousness where Stardust and I appeared as two souls standing together, chatting. I knew it was the two of us but I could not tell which soul was hers and which mine. I couldn't tell us apart. All I saw in this graced and momentary place were two beautiful souls conversing.
I believe I was given a glimpse of how God--or Goddess or Great Creator, whatever we may call the All-Knowing One--sees us. Without concern for the physical attributes that so trouble us human beings, without judgment, which we leap to so easily, without the categories we are quick to construct and the presumptions that underlie our disapproving thoughts and looks. Without any kind of scorecard to mark failings and faults. I knew positively in that moment that God has only unconditional love for each one of us and deep respect for our extraordinary individual journeys.
The experience lasted but a few seconds. Just as suddenly as we had become bodiless and been transported to a deeper level, Stardust and I were back in the noisy shelter and she was still complaining. She seemed to have no idea where we just had been together or what I had seen of her soul. She wasn't changed, but I was. I could no longer ignore her. I was awestruck that this--this misfit had been used by God to educate me about the presence of the divine in every single one of us. Stardust was the catalyst for what I have come to call a "God-sighting," God revealing God's Self through what our culture calls crazies, misfits, weirdos.
Misfits
I have been drawn to misfits ever since. Now I am graced with another misfit in my life, a man who lives in the costume shop of a theatre and in exchange serves the theatre as a doorman. Daniel is a true visionary and, like most visionaries in history, has been ridiculed and dismissed because he lives so completely outside the norms of our culture and society. He has spent his life honoring the earth in deep ways, composting and planting gardens wherever he goes, transforming dead soil and vacant lots into a flourish of flowers and vegetables. He refuses to use fossil fuels, relying instead only on human powered transportation. But his vision and plan for creating sustainable cities in the 21st century is dismissed precisely because he is a misfit.
Misfits are in good company. Wasn't Christ a misfit, challenging the normal and conventional norms of his time? Didn't Christ attract misfits like Zaccheus and through them reveal God's deep love and acceptance of us just as we are? Isn't scripture full of the stories and adventures of misfits like Noah, Esther, Miriam, Moses, Jeremiah, David? Weren't some of the great teachers, mystics and leaders throughout history, like Gandhi and Dorothy Day, Carl Jung and Emily Dickinson - misfits all? I believe misfits are here for a sacred purpose. They are another face of God looking at us, challenging us, complaining if you will, like Stardust to draw attention to a problem we are called upon to help solve. What if part of Christ's message is to be more of a misfit? May Christ the Misfit be with us.
Webster's defines a misfit as a person poorly adjusted to his environment. Well, if not at this time, then when? When I get overly caught up in the pull of our culture to achieve and succeed, I run into a misfit and I re-learn the lesson that being a misfit may well be one of the greatest of God's many graces.
Deborah Burke works as a writer and editor in Cleveland, Ohio. She is a certified minister in the Federation of Christian Ministries.