I personal a peculiar baseball cap that I put on on a regular basis. It’s a black hat, easy in look, save for the goofy-looking pinkish blob prominently featured above the rim. The blob is smiling, tongue out, with its large googly eyes large and staring and joyful. The blob has a reputation; it’s Morph. And Morph is a minor character from the largely forgotten 2002 Disney animated movie Treasure Planet. This amorphous little blob is the wily companion of the movie’s antagonist, Captain John Silver. Morph doesn’t communicate, however he can morph into something, which units up a lot of film shenanigans.
I can depend on one hand the quantity of people that, upon seeing that hat atop my head, level and say, “Oh! Treasure Planet, proper?” Of these 5 individuals, two of them have been capable of bring to mind the identify Morph. Largely, my hat earns me curious glances, dozens of eye rolls, and the inevitable exacerbated sigh as an harmless query leads to an in depth clarification of a movie nobody cares to recollect.
Why put on it? Donning little Morph atop my head does me few favors. I don’t look cool, cultured, or significantly grounded. At greatest, I come off as eccentric or definitely odd. What am I making an attempt to show?
Nicely, nothing. I really like that hat. I really like that movie. After I encounter one other particular person on the market within the large world who shares that love of a narrative of house pirates, we’re immediately bonded. Perhaps that’s why I put on that hat: as a beacon to name others throughout the bridge of my peculiar love of story.
Within the Ignatian custom, we insist that God is in all issues. It’s a panoramic declare. We glimpse and study one thing of God in every factor round us. It’s so unimaginable as to be overwhelming. We will’t take all of it in, so we collapse particular person particulars into basic ideas. We mixture concepts. We skip previous the sights we see daily.
God is in that oak tree, certain, however I noticed that yesterday and have locations to be.
That’s why we’d like the bizarre. Tiny, obscure particulars jar us out of our routines. They trigger us to cease, puzzle, and surprise. Our sneakers skid to a halt—even when only for a second—as we do a double take, circle again, and guarantee our eyes haven’t deceived us. God is right here, too. God is within the weird and the extraordinary. God speaks to us, inviting us to a disposition of curiosity, shared awe, and laughter.
Is that why I put on that foolish hat? Maybe. I don’t declare that an encounter with my Treasure Planet cap instigates a spiritual expertise. But it surely does stir in others questions. It presents a gap for shared story. It’s uncommon and so causes these sneakers to skid to a cease and heads to whip round in a confused double take.
“What’s in your hat?”
There are these uncommon encounters when Morph is acknowledged, and Treasure Planet is well known. However extra usually, naming the quirkiness of my cap is an invite to the questioners to mine their very own tales for eccentric particulars. To supply up their very own bizarre anecdotes. To snicker and surprise and shake their heads.
We’d like the bizarre and the great to spark a dialog.
God is in all issues, however it’s too simple to coast by and get misplaced in an amorphous god that’s in all places however probably not wherever. We’d like foolish specificity to floor us. We’d like the bizarre and the great to spark a dialog, to result in an Aha!, and to offer the bridge of story throughout which we stroll to satisfy one other.
Within the sharing of the story, group blossoms. And God, Three-in-One, all the time delights in that.
