Why you gotta be so weird?

Man is drawn to the fringe. But just as we cannot illuminate shifting shadows to better see and understand them, some things cannot be scientifically captured and still remain meaningful.

Man is made to live in a world that is a little strange, a little wild, a little perplexing, a little dangerous. His nature is fitted to that world; indeed, he is made out of it, and so his soul is fashioned from and to a cosmos filled with mysterious things that gesture slightly beyond his intuition, inhabited by mysterious beings that live slightly beyond his perception. He wants there to be secret things hidden in dark places, both for good and ill; he wants there to be dragons keeping the way to treasure; he wants there to be ancient forests he must tame, bottomless pits he must explore, cosmic peaks he must conquer—and he wants there to be enchanted glades that might transform him, faeries that might seduce him, wolves that might maul him, and tricksters that might best him. In his heart he knows that these things are truly found in the earth, even if they do not scientifically exist, because they are truly found in him, and he is made from the earth.

Unfortunately this yearning for the fringe is difficult to integrate with a holistic everyday piety—especially with a modern, empirical mindset. It is difficult to discern the true nature of the weirdness of the world—especially when we are conditioned to believe that our chief tool for doing so is a quasi-scientific method of investigation, rather than intuition. It is even more difficult to discern the proper place for the weirdness in our generally mundane lives—especially when we are conditioned to believe that our chief tool for doing so is a quasi-scientific interrogation of God’s word, rather than imaginative reflection on its patterns and principles.

Rightly ordering ourselves to the weirdness of the world is much harder than just acting weird, and hoping the world plays along. Unfortunately the easy road is the wide one—and when we act weird, we act weird in distinctly modern ways. So, among those eager for re-enchantment, the emphasis frustratingly slides into cryptids and campfire stories; and among those hostile to re-enchantment, into flat earth and reptilians.

Why?

I don’t have this all figured out. But it does seem to me that both sides are actually committing the same basic error: retaining a modernist/materialist overemphasis on the empirical facts, which leads them to ask for scientific instead of symbolic explanations. One side wants to capture Mothman and Bigfoot in a taxonomy, instead of reflecting on the prior, spiritual question of why Mothman and Bigfoot are dark and blurry to begin with. The other side wants to capture the flatness of the earth in a model, instead of reflecting on the prior, spiritual question of why the heavens are curved.

Yes, cryptids can be observed. And yes, most of the time the earth is observably flat. But that doesn’t mean that your yearning for weirdness should flow into modernist thought-channels. It just doesn’t follow. There are deeper and better waters. Farther up and farther in.