Otherworldliness

This evening I found myself thinking about someone I know, someone who's always been very friendly to me and who, for many reasons, should be somebody I like very much. But I've never been able to warm to this person. And I realized suddenly-- through one image coming into my mind-- why that was. It was because this person seems to belong entirely in the modern world-- to be completely at home in it.

I then realized that everybody I like the most is a kind of fish out of water, otherworldly in some way.

It might be because they are conservative, old-fashioned and rather out of place in contemporary society. It might be because they are conservative Catholics and out of place in our secular era.

But I'm extremely fond of quite a few people who are neither conservative nor religious. Even with them, this criterion of otherworldliness seems to apply. 

This seemed like a great insight when it struck me. Now I write it out, I doubt myself. Maybe everybody thinks their closest friends are special and different in some way. Maybe I sound like an emo teenager. What the heck. My point is that Christian hostility to "the world" and "wordliness" doesn't seem strange or perverse, when I view it in this way.