No Ordinary People
Mark Twain once told a story of a man who searched the whole earth to meet the greatest general, but he died before he could find such a person. When he got to Heaven, he asked St. Peter who the greatest general was. St. Peter showed him a man he knew well. “But he was no general,” said the man. “He was just an ordinary cobbler.” “But if he had been a general,” St. Peter said, “he would have been the greatest”.We don’t really know of what great things each of us are capable. We may get glimpses of our own divine potential, but even our very wildest aspirations and hopes and dreams are but pale shadows of the glory and splendor that is our destiny if we do all we can to qualify for the saving grace of our Savior’s Atonement. CS Lewis said, “It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare. There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilization—these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit—immortal horrors or everlasting splendors. Next to the Blessed Sacrament itself, your neighbor is the holiest object presented to your senses.” When we take the time to understand and to truly accept the reality that everyone we meet could be an actual God or Goddess one day, then we will find it not only perfectly natural but also practically inevitable to treat everyone we meet with the same kind of reverence and respect and love with which we treat our Heavenly Father. When the Savior commanded us not to judge, He was not merely counseling us to reduce a complex and multifaceted living and breathing human being, full of hopes and dreams and strengths and weaknesses and successes and failures, into an inaccurate, cliched and grossly oversimplified stereotype, but rather He was cautioning us against making such reductions not of an “ordinary person” or a “mere mortal” but of a child of God, an eternal being whose beauty and wisdom and glory defy all description. On the TV Show Ted Lasso, Ted Lasso says, “Guys have underestimated me my entire life and for years I never understood why – it used to really bother me. Then one day I was driving my little boy to school, and I saw a quote by Walt Whitman, it was painted on the wall there and it said, ‘Be curious, not judgmental.’ I like that. So, I get back in my car and I’m driving to work and all of a sudden it hits me – all them fellas that used to belittle me, not a single one of them was curious. You know, they thought they had everything all figured out, so they judged everything, and they judged everyone. And I realized that their underestimating me – who I was - had nothing to do with it. Because if they were curious, they would’ve asked questions.” I hope that none of us make the mistake that anyone around us, including and perhaps especially ourselves, is an ordinary person or a mere mortal. I hope that we can all choose to be curious rather than judgmental. I hope that we can truly believe that the cobbler down the street could be the greatest general who ever lived if he had been given the opportunity. I know that each and every one of us are destined to be more awesome and glorious and godly than we can possibly imagine.
