The goodness of the strange
On Monday of Holy Week, I attended the Chrism Mass in my diocese for the first time; somehow I’ve made it through thirty-three Catholic church-going years without attending this particular Mass before. This year, I volunteered to sing in the choir for the Mass, so that Monday evening I snow-shoed through a snowstorm to the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Rosary in Duluth.
Many aspects of the liturgy were beautiful and moving, including the renewal of priestly vows, our bishop’s exhortations in his homily to his priests, and his description of the holy oil as God’s grace in a visible, physical way. I sang my parts from the choir loft, listened to the bishop’s words, and did my best to enter into the liturgy.
At one particular moment, as my mind drifted during the blessing of the oils, and my subconscious was thinking something along the lines of oh yes, oh yes, it’s all very beautiful, what a nice ritual, I know what’s going on, the bishop blew—fwooosh!—into his microphone, and my ears and eyes perked up. Fwoosh! Fwoosh! Six times he blew into the cask of oil, directing his air into the form of three crosses, the rush of air roaring through his microphone. I had no idea this was coming. I had never seen such a ritual before. It was strange, it was beautiful, and the goodness of it overwhelmed me.
blessing of oils at the Chrism Mass
There was something in the strangeness, the unexpectedness of the gesture that arrested me in a way that the (beautiful) prayers of blessing, on their own, did not. We become complacent or apathetic at times when we perceive our surroundings as overly familiar. But when we encounter the strange—as Hopkins put it, “all things counter, original, spare, strange”—we are pulled in a way out of ourselves and out of our complacency. The plane wherein we feel we’ve got this all figured out, we know what is going to happen, becomes challenged. And we pay attention.
When I think of some of my favorite Gospel stories, the ones that stick with me and make me ponder, it’s the strangeness of them that stands out. Jesus curses the fig tree because he’s hungry and it bears no fruit for him (even though, according to Mark, it is not the time for it to bear figs);1 Jesus heals the deaf and mute man by spitting and touching his tongue, by sticking his fingers in his ears;2 the blind man he heals by smearing mud against his eyes.3 And when the blind man begins to see, is healed by our Lord who could surely handle the job in one quick move, he does not see clearly at first, but sees people as if they are trees walking about. What a curiosity! What a strange way for our Lord to work.
But it is the strangeness of these encounters that challenge us, that snap us into attention, that make us look deeper and question, what is the meaning of this?
And herein lies an important distinction: in the chrism Mass, the bishop’s breath over the oils does mean something, signifies an invisible reality. When Jesus restores sight to the blind man in stages, not all at once, he does so with purpose and with meaning for us. He curses the fig tree not arbitrarily, not out of hunger and anger, but to instruct. But it is the curiosity of it all that draws us in, that makes us question.
This sense of the word curiosity as describing something strange or unusual is somewhat antiquated, like the cabinet of curiosities that became popular in the sixteenth century. More frequently, curiosity means an innocent inquisitiveness, a desire to know more. But for Aquinas, curiosity was a sin, the opposite of studiousness. Curiosity in this sense is the desire to know even what we ought not to know, or a preoccupation with things that are not of ultimate importance. As fallen beings, our curiosity can easily lead us into sin, can make us want to know what various experiences of sin are like.
This is the sin of our first parents, desiring to know and experience ever more, even at the expense of life in God. In this sense, we must be wary of the fact that strangeness can also lead us to the vice of curiosity. What is twisted in us by sin can lead us in pride and curiosity to seek strangeness for its own sake or out of some other perversion, or even deliberately as a way to “subvert” the good.
Yet the “counter, original, spare, strange” ought to lead us, again as Hopkins writes, to praise him. Indeed, Glory be to God for dappled things. When we encounter the strange, when it grabs our attention, we ought to pursue it to its source, the God who has created beyond the conjecture of human knowledge. The strangeness of the world, the unexpectedness of God, ought to draw us deeper into His mystery. This strangeness can function to pull us out of the mundanity and everydayness of life and remind us that we do not know everything, that experience can still be unexpected and strange. When we grow intellectually complacent, the strangeness of God and his revelation ought to jolt us awake and remind us to walk in humility, awe, and wonder.
Author’s Note: the title of this essay is a play on the title of James Matthew Wilson’s poetry collection, The Strangeness of the Good, which takes its name from a line in one of the collection’s poems, “Through the Water.”
