This article first appeared in Our Sunday Visitor magazine. Subscribe to receive the monthly magazine here.
The short article that popped up in my Facebook feed assured the reader, in a breathless eyes-shining sort of way, that there has never been anyone like and never will be anyone like you! Ever ever ever! You’re unique! Special! One of a kind!
The mind behind the claim, judging from all the things of this sort I’ve read, can’t offer a good answer to the question of what makes us special. Why are you special? Because you are! How are you special? Who knows?
What’s basically sheer assertion doesn’t help. I’m not going to feel special unless I know why I’m special. Christianity offers a reason to believe that I am.
You’re not special
You’re apparently not special. All around you are people who are basically you, for normal human purposes. The differences are minor and inconsequential. From what you can see of your place in the big wide world, you’re just another brick in the wall.
Unless you happen to be one of the very few great men or women of history, your life won’t change the world much, and a generation or two after you die, no one will remember you and whatever good you did.
Even if you’re one of a kind, you’re not one of a kind for long. Your fate is to be one of the unremembered dead.
Besides being unbelievable, the idea that we’re uniquely special is dangerous to those of us with normal human narcissism and self-regard. We (I know this too well) already think we’re special, due attention and privileges others aren’t. We don’t need that feeling affirmed.
It also doesn’t help the people who do need to believe it, who’ve been put down by others and take their idea of themselves from people who don’t appreciate them. Someone telling them they’re special doesn’t give them reason to believe they’re special.
But you are special
Why are we special? The mind behind the meme can’t answer that. Christianity can. What makes us unique, special, one of a kind is the fact that we are people in relationship — one relationship in particular.
You are unique and special because you are unique and special to your family, friends, neighbors, fellow parishioners, co-workers, other parents at your kids’ school — the people you help and the people who help you: your pastor, your doctors, and the entire web of relations you create over a lifetime.
What makes you special is the history you have with all these people. That’s utterly unique in the history of the world. You can’t be replaced. You’re a custom creation, not a mass-produced brick in a big wall.
Who cares that some random meme or ad or happy-talk life coach says you’re special? That’s just words. You care if someone you know says “I love you” or “You matter to me.”
You are special to God
But that’s not enough — by itself — to make us truly special, because it will pass away. What makes each of us truly special is that God says to us “I love you” and “You matter to me,” and that will be true for eternity.
God alone sees how we’re genuinely unique among all the human beings in the history of the world, though I don’t think he cares about that. Not because I have any idea how God thinks, but because I know something about how love works.
All those I truly love, I love for themselves. Whether or not they’re unique never enters my mind.
If someone reliably informed me that my wife is a woman almost exactly like many other women, I wouldn’t care. I know that already. It’s a big world. Her being unique isn’t in the list of characteristics I care about.
It’s this woman I courted and married and have lived with for 42 years; who came with a network of parents, siblings and friends; with whom I had four children; who’s taken my friends as her own; whose joys and pain I’ve shared; who’s annoyed and frustrated me — and whom I’ve annoyed and frustrated even more — in a relation that has deeply formed and reformed us both.
I don’t love her because she’s unique. I love her because she’s her, and much of her being her is all that history, the relations with others that she had and the relation with me that we made.
God makes this eternal. His love grounds our desire to feel special, raises it from being a general and not necessarily convincing human claim — and one that, even if true, passes away — to a reality grounded in the Creator himself.
That’s part, I think, of what it means to call him “Our Father.”
