A Bohemian Benediction: Blessed are the "Weird"

I know that everything God does will endure forever; nothing can be added to it and nothing taken from it. God does it so that people will fear him.

Whatever is has already been,
    and what will be has been before;
    and God will call the past to account.

“Why are you wearing that stupid bunny suit?” Donnie asks Frank as they sit in the Middlesex Theater, barely watching Night of the Living Dead as the girl he “goes with,” Gretchen Ross, calmly sleeps beside him. 

“Why are you wearing that stupid man suit?” Frank responds back and Donnie smiles, darkly, almost maniacally. Before he is compelled, in a schizophrenic episode, to burn down the house of a local and infamous self-help guru.

The cult classic Donnie Darko came out in 2001. Right on the eve of 9/11. With a scene of a plane crashing into a building, the film’s revenue was marginal as the country reeled from the devastating terrorist attack. But the film’s success came after the fact, when a bunch of strange on-the-fringe and outside the margins folks watched the film. Through word of mouth, although never becoming popular in the mainstream, the film became an instant hit, both among film buffs and quirky outsiders alike (the two demographics overlapping often).

It is my brother Zack’s favorite movie. This I always found to be an oddity. My brother is the nicest person alive; when experts of the Enneagram recorded the description of the Peacemaker Type 9, I’m fairly certain they just studied my brother and his behavior for a week. Charming, accommodating, intelligent, and subtly stubborn, there’s always more to Zack than meets the eye. It’s what I’ve always admired about him and always will. Although he has the trappings of a normal guy, what with being a beloved barista, a huge basketball fan, and a frequent buyer of tacos, Zack has insights that, with a few more listens and reflections, are deeply wise beyond his years. He holds back until the time is right to speak truths no one else could think of because they are busy either talking too much or thinking too much. 

The reason I find it strange, however, that Zack loves Donnie Darko is how little Zack reminds me of Donnie. Further exacerbating that is how much I resemble Donnie myself. The good of him, the bad of him, and at least partially, the ugly. Zack is kind and unassuming interpersonally; Donnie (and myself) are intentional and intense interpersonally. Zack can talk to anyone about anything; Donnie (and myself) get hung up on rabbit holes (pun intended) and deep dives into topics of interest while being total crap at small talk. Zack is pretty averse to most conflicts; Donnie (and myself) are as well but become extra fired up when we smell even a trace of phoniness or inauthenticity, particularly from people in charge or of influence. 

All this being said, what is universally true about all three of us as characters in our personal narratives is our bohemian worldview perspective. We divert from the norm, intentionally and unintentionally, and struggle at times coming to terms with why. Although the signs say to Keep Portland Weird in my hometown, I fear often I just won’t fit in with the ever-evolving brand of “weird.” 

Lately I’ve felt a tug on my heart from God to love myself better. This I keep finding peculiar; it feels, in some senses, to be an unbiblical and “selfish” notion. With time, with reflection, with way too much interior excavation (damn you COVID-19), I am realizing at a head and heart level that the only way I can love others well is by loving myself well. I only do that by believing in my Beloved state in the relationship of Love that we call the trinity. 

A tangible step to loving myself well at a heart level is to embrace my weirdness. A little left of center and to the far right (but not alt-right) of conventional, even in a bizarro city like Portland, I internalized, for years, that my weirdness excluded me from belonging. And even after I found that belonging and felt it deeply in my heart, the love of that weirdness from myself has never quite come.

Until today. 

Donnie’s biggest fear in the film is dying, specifically alone. Although I do not fear dying alone as I believe God is always with me, I still am unlearning a fear of dying unloved. By a significant other but also unloved by my own self. With God’s help, primarily a lot of prayer, a large heaping of grace, and a little capturing of dastardly thought, I am afraid of this less and less everyday.  

And I hope you love yourself better by reading about my sloppy attempts to do likewise. 


Alternative is the new conform. The deepest of ironies. Hipster culture isn’t hipster anymore; it just is hip and trendy and cool and accepted. With everyone so deeply entrenched in their communities, their lifestyles, their preferences, personal expression is lacking, unless it is expressed with extremes.

Look to Lady Gaga. Or Nicki Minaj. Or Billie Eilish. These female pop stars, talented in their own distinct ways, rose in fame and popularity in part by their distinct divergence from what was then the norm. In particular, they needed the ire as much as the likes, the anger as much as the appreciation. The love yes but definitely the hate as well. Polarity is popularity. Need further proof? Look at our president. 

This “weirdness” the Beatles perfected decades earlier. Elvis did it a decade before that. Tupac and Biggie added more flavor and dissension decades after that. Artists are “weird” prophets with the addition of a guitar or a pen or a camera or a mic. 

But “weird” is the new cool. Yet within this parameter of cool being a particular kind of weird, other weirdos are left in the dust. There’s strangeness that’s awkward and there’s strangeness that’s interesting. 

The link between quirky and intriguing are entrenched deeply. You can’t get attention, notoriety, or subscriptions with creativity and ingenuity alone; you have to be liked, admired, and appreciated by the public as well. This is why Drake gets more listens than Frank Ocean. Why Post Malone is much more accessible than Sufjan Stevens. Further, this isn’t even to say that accessible music, “pop” art for the sake of argument, is any less valuable than more obscure, abstract weird creations. 

It’s more that our world definitely prefers one form of strange, one brand of crazy, one style of eccentric, far more than the other. In the 2020s, you have to be weird to be cool, but you can definitely be weird and not be cool.

Jesus is an interesting bridge between this divide. Hailing from Nazareth gave him weird points but scored him zero cool points. He would be the bell of the ball amidst a crowd of thousands then would cryptically chastise his little band of twelve or allude to his own death in a nonchalant form of acceptance all in the same day. 

Yet what makes Him stand apart from any figure, religious, creative, or otherwise, is His universal tending to whoever approached Him, the hippest, coolest “insiders” or the cringiest, most awkward “outsiders.” His metrics for human value and dignity looked nothing like any of other contemporaries. His enemies didn’t understand how He could seemingly disobey ancient law while claiming He was actually fulfilling that same law, and His closest friends totally missed the point of the kind of kingdom He was ushering in by vouching for a place in his hierarchy and wanting Him to rain down holy fire on any who would rail against their message. He was opposed to violence but endorsed division amidst families. He provided dignity and identity to women, particularly sexually sinful women, while also increasing the absurd bar for sexual purity. He rebuked the Pharisees left and right rather aggressively but urged His Father to forgive them for killing Him because they “know not what they do.”

Jesus is comfortable with paradox. He made distinctions between Himself and His Father, but also claimed they were one and the same. He leaves ninety-nine sheep vulnerable in order to go and rescue one. On paper, neither of those things make a lick of sense.

Jesus is comfortable with your paradoxes. How you love people and hate them in the same breath. How you have a big heart for one community of outsiders and nothing but disdain for another. How you sing nothing but praises one hour for that miraculous paycheck and curse Him colorfully the next hour after that heart wrenching text.

We are bundles of contradictions. In some ways we believe ardently and with all of who we are. And yet, in other ways we flat out rebel and intentionally ignore the voice of God. 

No one, and I mean no one, believes 100% correctly, all of the time, or without any detours, distractions, or doubts.  

The biggest thing that separates humans from animals is our very weirdness. We are far more than instinctual drives, far more than biological urges, far more than repeated patterns of behavior. The very definition of the word weird is “suggesting something supernatural; uncanny.” We do things that make sense one minute and absurdly ludicrous things the next minute. We pray to a God we can’t see. We believe things we read on the internet without additional research. We love people even when it is hard, it is tiring, it is outlandish, and when it serves no true social bonding purpose. 

From one bohemian to another, from one guy who is far too aware of his own strangeness to any reader who may or may not be aware of their own peculiarity, let’s look to God to bless our quirks, our weirdness, our distinctiveness. Our specialness.

Not to the fickle, cruel, and uncaring world.


2005. Middle school. The darkest of the “dark” years. It was a chapel day so the girls wore dresses to the knees and the guys wore khakis and collared shirts. I wasn’t cool enough then to pop mine.

I was sitting next to Nicole. We had assigned seating in the pews. I had only started to break free from the black cave of social withholding and cringey awkwardness. Nicole was nice. But she was cool. And popular and pretty and funny and hardly awkward at all. Yet somehow I bursted out in the fast break of a pleasant, kinda obscure conversation with her. 

“Why do you think being normal is weird?” she asked rather honestly. I’ve been staring at this screen for five minutes, and I can’t even remember how in the hell I got into this kind of talk with the most attractive, preppy girl at my school. Being weird definitely puts you in “uncanny” situations.

“Because if everyone in the world was normal, the world would be weird. But if everyone in the world was weird, then the world is normal.”

Again, don’t know what in the world thirteen year old Caleb was thinking. And yet, social conventions be damned, Nicole thought for a second as I gazed at her gorgeous blonde hair and stunning blue eyes without fear of being that guy

She replied.

“I get that, actually. It makes sense. You’re really smart, Caleb,” then cue the reddest cheeks this guy has ever or will ever get (prior to my wedding day, TBD). 

A benediction is a blessing a reverend, pastor, or teacher gives to congregants at the end of a sermon and teaching. In contemporary times, this is usually done as a kind of prayer. Generally the TED talker wants to hammer his or her point all the more, so it’s usually a space to emphatically reiterate the points already addressed.

So here’s mine, officially: 

Don’t hide yourself from others, from God, and from yourself for fear of not being accepted or liked. Further, don’t hide yourself by acting like someone else who is acceptable or likable. Rather, in the Beloved embrace of God as Father, Son, and Spirit, bless the world with your particular brand of weirdness.

Strangeness isn’t just the haven of creatives. You can be an awkward engineer, an aloof electrician, a barista who laughs way too loud. You can be a dishwasher who draws upside down stick figures, a mailman who is a walking Wikipedia page about reptiles. You can be any sort of weird God made you to be, just be rest assured that your difference from the norm is a blessing to the world and not a curse to be removed. And not just if others give you props for it; it is a blessing in ways we can see and ways we can’t. It is a blessing when it feels like a curse, and a curse even when it seems to be a blessing (removed from God, anyway). God uses your awkward, cringey, and odd self to promote His kingdom. That’s why being weird is “supernatural.” 

So go, be quirky, be strange, be “weird.” And be blessed by a God who is also quirky, also strange, and the “weirdest” and most ‘set apart’ of all beings to ever exist.