I am an identical twin. When we were around about 20 years old, we were standing in a queue at Pick ‘n Pay when an elderly lady behind us asked us if we were related. We said we were. Sisters? Yes. Twins? Yes. Identical? Yes.
After staring at us both for a while, she nodded emphatically, pointed at me and said, “You’re different!”
After years of the same “Tweedle-Dum and Tweedle-Dee”, “I’m seeing double”, “Double Trouble” jokes, this was really refreshing! But she wasn’t joking, she was super serious! She had somehow come up with who was more “normal” in her view, and therefore could identify which one had strayed from this norm.
It continues to amuse me to this day and it has certainly given my family fodder for whenever I disagree with anything…they just say, “But you’re DIFFERENT” and leave it at that!
But it also intrigues me because my sister and I have certainly experienced this tendency in almost everyone to find the difference…and then to exaggerate that difference because it just seems more comfortable for them. So at school, I tended to be a little more “smiley” than my sister, but people only seemed happy when I was “the happy one” and she was “the ice-princess”. Or, she got top in the school and went on to study medicine, and so it stands to reason that I really struggled at school and couldn’t get accepted to study medicine. It just seemed more comfortable for people to be able to view the smallest difference as a polar-opposite.
Thankfully for us, we had extremely wise parents who coached us against “competition and comparison” from an early age, and we have come out more united, and able to help other identical twins, than hugely harmed by this.
But, as my sister likes to ask her kids about small “bad habits”: what will this look like when it grows up? For example, if I develop an early tendency for lying to get ahead when I am young, what could this develop into as I grow older? In the same way, what can our attitudes and the smallest “misalignment” of our hearts become if we don’t keep them in check?
And the scary thing is that this tendency of the old lady to establish a norm and then identify the person who strays from it, and the tendency to take small differences and polarise them into good and bad, clever and stupid, grows up into something viciously nasty and murderous. It is what we see with the current extremism around differences in race, culture, religion, nationality, gender, sexual-orientation, levels & types of ability, mental health, language, social-status.
On another note, which I have only realised recently is related (I will explain why soon): when I am singing in church, I enjoy taking scripture and weaving it into the song that is being sung as a way of harmonising and expressing truths about God. I especially love singing, “Holy, holy, holy”, as it is what the living creatures in Heaven sing – continuously! I love that I can join them in that, but also that, after millenia of worshiping at the throne, this is still their response to God: I like to think I can learn quite a bit from that!
Of late, I have felt like God has been prompting me to sing, “Other, Other, Other”…because that is what “Holy” means – entirely other, set apart, unlike us, God’s thoughts are not our thoughts, God’s ways are not our ways: keep believing that I Am Other…far more, deeper, higher, wider…”Other, Other, Other”…trust in Me, don’t lean on your own understanding, for I am God, not man, the Holy One among you…
In one sense God is completely and utterly Other to us. And in another sense, we are intimately alike: we are, after all, created in God’s image – the Creator set the likeness of God in us. Together, we reflect God’s glory and fullness. Together, we reflect the fullness of God’s Otherness…
As Jesus-followers specifically, this mix of God being completely Other and us, together, reflecting God’s glory – this mix is beautiful! It means that the “otherness” in people around us gives us a fuller revelation of who and how God is…it means that we should search out the differences in people around us as scintillating, mesmerising pieces of a beautiful, beautiful whole. What a joy to encounter the Other in the other! How we can celebrate and revere each person, ESPECIALLY those who differ from our understanding of “normal”, because our God is entirely Other, and entirely Human; set-apart and intimately enmeshed; the same yesterday, today and tomorrow and continuously being revealed. And God has set the likeness of God in us.
From the Outer Limb 