“Whenever I’m asked why Southern writers particularly have a penchant for writing about freaks, I say it is because we are still able to recognize one. To be able to recognize a freak, you have to have some conception of the whole man.”
Flannery O’Connor, “The Grotesque in Southern Fiction,” in Mystery and Manners, page 44.
We live in a time of personal eccentricity, goofiness, experimentation, adolescence, quirkiness — angular people not connecting well and not understanding why and not even knowing who they themselves are. To be normal in our times is a significant grace. It requires that we know the Bible pretty well and can then take the next step of visualizing how that loveliness and wisdom in Christ can be embodied in our own humannness and dailyness and ordinariness and routines and opportunities and relationships. It is so refreshing to meet a normal person, an uncomplicated person, an honest and simple person. They are treasures, heroes, models.
How’s this for a life goal? To be normal.
“May the beauty of the Lord our God rest upon us.” Psalm 90:17
