Holy Eccentrics

An eccentric is "off center":  odd, strange, non-conforming, weird, not ordinary or balanced or mainstream. Not in itself a malignancy or pathology, eccentricity certainly can entail psychic suffering, anxiety, desolation; but the personality of an eccentric is too dense and complex to be summarized by a diagnostic category like OCD or "on the spectrum." There is a more benevolent than malevolent flavor to it. The eccentric often is endearing, humorous and even comedic, charming, interesting, creative, intelligent, artistic as well as solitary, non-competitive, not approval seeking.  

I am talking here about holy eccentrics. Intrinsic to their strangeness is that they are possessed by the Holy Spirit. Whatever deformity, dysfunction or disability has somehow been overwhelmed by Love, by an indescribable freedom, by a fascinating, captivating holiness. We have in the Church a long list of "holy fools": in Russia, the desert fathers and hermits, mendicants, and so forth. So a holy eccentric has three characteristic: strange, non-conforming, distinctive; intelligent and insightful in surprising ways; holy. A holy eccentric is strange, smart and saintly. Actually, there is a fourth: Delightful!

These figures are especially needed today as Christianity in the West is largely enslaved in bourgeois mediocrity. Such figures are entirely contradictory of "bourgie" comfort, security, conformity, meritocracy, technocracy, normality, and monotony. They are spontaneous, serendipitous, unpredictable, philosophical, poetic, dramatic, indescribable, mysterious and free.

I am not myself a certifiable eccentric. I am too ordinary:  not strange enough, not smart enough, not saintly enough. But I have a pronounced silly bone that some would call corny. I am "weird" enough to know an eccentric, and appreciate him. I will list my favorite holy eccentrics, starting with those closest to me and then my "honorable mention" list.

John Rapinich My best friend, little-big brother, uncle to my kids, was raised by his father, tough sailor-Slovak with no religion or education. In the early 1950s John had a nervous breakdown and then shock treatments in the US Army. He started a coffee shop in lower Manhattan which became a hangout for Jack Kerouac, Alan Ginsberg, and the beatnik crew, his friends. On an extended stay in Mexico he prayed at Our Lady of Guadalupe and had a hard conversion to Catholicism. He met our friend Fr. Paul Viale at a prolife rally; joined our charismatic prayer group and became our friend. He lived in the basement apartment of our home. His mother spent her adult life in a Meadowview Psychiatric Hospital, where she was joined in later years by her husband. John worked here as an aid. The family was reunited, in a psych ward!  We had the delight of attending their  sacramental marriage there very late in their life. John was an artist, an autodact, a voracious reader of literature, philosophy, theology. He married at the age of 50; I tried to talk him out of it; I was his best man; I was wrong about the marriage. In the last years of his life he threw himself into the Neocatechumenal Way with the passion with which he did everything. Years before he had done mission work in Mexico with charismatics. When he returned he would pray over us and we were "slain in the Spirit," a mysterious kind of ecstatic trance. He gave SO much to us! He loved us SO! He called us the "Lovable Laracys."

Gilbert Davidowicz. We shared an apartment for about a year, 1970, before I married. Severely neurotic! He told me that once he got on an elevator; got bad vibes from a man who said nothing; and then had to go home and stay in bed all day. He was strange. He was smart: something went amiss with his doctoral director in linguistics and he did not get his PhD. I had the feeling he was a brilliant, offbeat linguistic scholar. He was developing an innovative, global theory of the development of languages. He was not saintly in our Catholic way but was a devout Orthodox Jew, a man of God. We shared a tender friendship. Other than my girl friend who met him once or twice we had no mutual friends and never met each others families. When I learned of his death, I had no one with whom to grieve and reminisce: a sadness I was to experience with other random friends I have loved. Once he told me: "If you were able to know yourself, as another person, you would like you." I have thought about that quite a bit.

Ivan Illich. Wildly eccentric, anarchistic, erudite, brilliant, prophetic, brazenly counter-cultural, this mystic ex-priest was holy, in my view, in his own distinctive manner. Not canonizable! The reader of this blog has heard of him before.

Monsignor Lorenzo Albacete was a world-class holy eccentric in a league with Illich. Scientist, theologian, writer he epitomized the eccentric as charming, funny, quirky, delightful, surprising. He loved deeply and left a deep impact on so many, especially within Communion and Liberation. In his last years he sacrificially cared for his disabled brother, leaving a celebrity life as writer and speaker. I just finished his book Cry of the Heart, a poignant, deeply touching articulation of our call to "co-suffer" with those we love and cannot "fix."

Caryll Houselander was a tortured, idiosyncratic, brilliant, neurotic, single woman immensely gifted to write and care, intuitively and miraculously, for the mentally ill. She fell in love with the actually spy who was the basis for the James Bond character. Her written work in in a class of its own.

Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin with their Catholic Worker were exceptional ideologically in their combination of hardcore Catholic piety with heroic care for the poor, "cult, culture and cultivation,"  and a radical politics of anarchism and pacifism. Who else opposed World War II? Who refuses to pay taxes or adopt tax exempt status in the doing of good work? They were real outliers: not quite right for the mainstream Catholic Church or for leftist, Marxist politics. Even later, in the late 60s and into the 70s when they were widely respected by the New Left they adhered to the rigorous  sexual ethic and alienated many who admired them. Peter was the more idiosyncratic in personality and found in Dorothy extraordinary gifts of intelligence, character, spirituality, and leadership to single-handedly give birth to the eccentric Catholic Worker.

Heather King. After wild years of promiscuity, alcoholism, and multiple abortions, Heather King converted to a life of Catholic holiness given over to solitude, prayer, study, and writing. She is the closest thing we have to Caryll Houselander. I am reading sections of her Fifty Divine Eccentric Artists, Martyrs, Stigmatists, and Unsung Saints."   She is in part the inspiration for this essay as she is not only a world class holy eccentric herself but Founder and Lifetime President of the "I Love Holy Eccentrics Club." I am only Vice-President. I am a a premier member of her fan club and with her of the Caryll Houselander Fan Club.

Simone Weil.  This Jewish mystic and brilliant philosopher identified so passionately with Christ of the poor that she basically starved herself to death. More troublingly, she practiced a "spiritual anorexia" as she abstained from baptism and the sacramental life. Within her, extraordinary spiritual and intellectual greatness combined with a deep, Manichean compulsion to destroy her flesh, especially in its femininity. Years ago, in The Bridge, Monsignor John Oesterreicher wrote a penetrating psychological analysis of her that highlighted this self-annihilating side of her personality. But this does not diminish the splendor of her heroism, the profundity of her insight. Particularly significant is her attention to "attention."  She is perhaps the darkest of our eccentrics. 

Charles De Foucauld. Rich, indulgent, decadent atheist; then fierce, fearless, legendary Foreign Legion warrior in the Sahara; then ground-breaking, astute anthropologist of that dessert; then ardent convert to Catholicism; then most ascetic of monks; then humble servant of a convent of nuns in the Holy Land; then solitary, Eucharist-centered, eccentric hermit-friend of the Bedouins of the Sahara; then assassinated; and finally canonized. He is the most extreme, extravagant of our eccentrics.  

Honorary Mention.  

Theologians. Eccentricity as oddness and non-conformity is hardly intrinsic to good theology. Intelligence and holiness of life are; in that eccentricity and theology overlap. But as I think of the best theologians I have known, even through lectures and reading, I notice that an inordinate number are eccentric. 

Scott Hahn, arguably the most influential, erudite, lucid and animated American Catholic theologian of our time has in his personal library over 50,000 books. That is not normal!

The John Paul Institute for Marriage/Family in Washington D.C. centers itself precisely in the Communio theology of John Paul, Benedict and Balthasar but has gathered a group of mesmerizingly distinct personalities: Adrian Walker, Fr. Paolo Prosperi, both David Schindlers, Michael Hanby, Margaret McCarthy, Fr. Antonio Lopez and others. Add to these high-wired friends like Larry Chapp and Rodney Howsare! One could hardly imagine such a colorful, exciting, disparate, surprising collage!

Even such rock solid, perfectly centered theologians like the great Avery Dulles and his younger colleague Monsignor Tom Guarino of Seton Hall package impeccable theological precision, orthodoxy, breath of erudition and depth of insight in personalities that are distinct and delightful!

Pope Francis.  Some time ago I described our Holy Father as eccentric. This was intended in a largely positive way: free, creative, original, surprising, someone who thinks and acts "outside of the box." I would cherish him as friend, confessor, homilist or retreat director. But as pope such an eccentric is a train-wreck: contradictory, incoherent, polarizing, confused and confusing. He is singularly ill equipped to unite the Church around a clear, faithful articulation of the Gospel!

My Maverick Priest Friends.  Within the last decade, I lost three priest friends (Mark, John, Jerry) who were so different from each other and yet shared similarities: highly intelligent and spiritual, charismatic, fun, interesting, devoted to the Church, idiosyncratic. I knew each well: in their striking gifts and pronounced flaws. Each died in disgrace due to allegations of sexual abuse. Not for me to judge culpability: that is up to God. With the Church I grieve any harm done. I know them well enough to be confident they were contrite for any wrongdoing; that they suffered already here on earth temporal punishment due for their sins; and that any amends not paid is progressing in God's mercy in purgatory. As of now they are more on my "pray for" list than my "pray to list" as they remain on my gratitude list.

My Uncle Bill Gallagher, my mother's brother, is the outstanding eccentric of our family. (Eccentricity does not run in the paternal side.) He was the polar opposite of (and at the very least an annoyance to) my father: the one unpredictable, erratic, comedic, spontaneous, a smoker and a drinker, unreliable, quirky, fascinating; the other steady, stable, organized, disciplined, prudent, sober, unfailingly loyal and entirely trustworthy. I wanted to be like Uncle Billy; but I also more deeply, unconsciously emulated my fine father. The two could not be put together. But if I were able to combine even a little of the best qualities of each I would be a sensation! They played handball and golf together: that was how my mother and father met. So thanks to sports and their friendship I am here today at all. Bill was a wounded and decorated war hero. Then studied at Columbia University. He was in and out of a dozen business endeavors in South American counties: TV tubes, piranha teeth encasements, and all kinds of things but all the time he was really working for military intelligence. He never told anyone: not wife, daughter, sisters. They learned after his death: a perfect double life. He was hilariously comedic, puzzling, fascinating. Very, very smart. On the saintly scale not so strong; not exactly on the path to canonization. But he was a man of faith. His German, born-again Kurt (with a K) kept saying how wonderful was his "witness." This puzzled me as Bill was the very least preachy, moralistic, or overtly pious person in the hemisphere. When I asked him he said: "You have been talking to Kurt (with a K). All he talks about is "born again." I know when I was born again. When I made my first communion." Shortly before his death is memory was weak and he called me: "Help me Matty. I can't remember the Our Father." So we prayed the Our Father together. He once called me his best friend. The best compliment I ever got. 

Thank you, heavenly Father,  for our delightful, strange, holy, flawed, tormented, wise, affectionate, fascinating eccentrics!  May we, even in our defects and failings, delight in each other and in your Joy in us!