God Loves the Odd. Grace, quirkiness and the Neurodiverse.

Added: 2026-05-10

[00:00:17]I've been having to think more about St. Thomas Aquinas recently and I've been particularly struck again by his phrase, "Grace perfects nature." It's a phrase I've used a thousand times in my life and I understood the theological principle behind it, but I've only recently really come to understand what a wonderful validation it is of quirkiness, eccentricity, and oddity.

[00:00:43]God doesn't mass-roduce personalities.

[00:00:45]In particular, the church is a place where he makes the most extraordinary variety that he weaves into our uniqueness.

[00:00:53]It matters that no two fingerprints are the same. It's a sign of the uniqueness of every single soul. A uniqueness that's often best expressed in the quirks of our personalities. There's a great deal of sociological pressure to make us conform. And perhaps that's one of the great differences between secular and Christian societies. We ought to value it more, talk about it more.

[00:01:16]Secular society values conformity because it can control, market, and judge with greater ease. There's a kind of inner therapeutic validation in the church where people are accepted as God made them, as we are.

[00:01:31]We now have language for some of this that earlier centuries lacked. We speak of autism being on a scale, ADHD, hyper sensitivity, sensory difference, of being neurodeivergent, categories that name what people have always quietly known about themselves, that they feel things at the wrong volume, perhaps that they think sideways, they can't easily make themselves into the smooth and standardized creatures modern life seems to require.

[00:02:02]Many such people sense the difference between themselves and others and wrongly, sadly, painfully find themselves uncomfortable about them under the pressure of secular expectations, which makes it more difficult to believe and to feel and to know that God really does love us as we are. But one of the antidotes to that discomfort is the realization. It's precisely those quirks that God uses to express the particular well, let's call it a vocation that he's given us.

[00:02:34]The church has known this long before psycho psychology had a vocabulary for it. Let's look at a few examples from the saints. If we think of some of the saints, it becomes clearer that it was precisely their differences that became what we might call the engine of their sanctity. Grace took a bombastic intellectual professor of rhetoric awfully pleased with himself with an oversensitized capacity for introspection and detail, a great brain and a great heart and made St. Augustine of Hippo, the author of the first autobiography in Western culture, one of the most profound theologians we profess, a man who truly integrated mind and heart in a unique way. One of my own favorite characters is St. Joseph of Coutino. He was absolutely hopeless, particularly at at intellectual things, but the sheer force of holiness in his life led him to well, he didn't do it.

[00:03:35]Of course, it was done to him. He was he was levitated above the altar in moments of profound mystical adoration miraculously.

[00:03:45]And it was precisely this extraordinary manifestation of the Holy Spirit that converted one of the most powerful Protestant courts in Europe at the time.

[00:03:55]A court intellectually serious enough to keep lightning on its payroll.

[00:04:02]Yet St. Joseph of Cupatino was considered too stupid to be ordained in the first place. What appeared to be intellectual obtuseness was not an obstacle to grace rather the state of his heart and soul allowed God to work through him in a way that led to a cascade of conversions through the manif visible manifestation of the Holy Spirit in his life. I mean let's look at one of the most effective saints has ever been in the west St. Francis of Aisi. Nothing normal about him. He was theatrical, emotional, impulsive, extravagant and initially obsessed with romantic glory.

[00:04:39]Before conversion, he loved fine clothes. He liked to party. He liked singing. He had dreams of knighthood.

[00:04:47]The same passionate intensity later became radical love of Christ. He didn't become emotionally moderate. He became holy. The extravagance remained. Perhaps extravagance is always an element in holiness, but now it was poured into poverty, into joy, into preaching, to love for creation, people, things, animals. You could say grace redirected Francis's fire. It didn't extinguish it.

[00:05:17]S of Lure was really quite odd. As a child, she was extraordinarily sensitive. Not merely delicate in the ordinary sense, but you might say emotionally porous. She cried very easily. Too easily. She felt slight intensely. Poor thing it hurt. And was deeply attached to the affections of those around her. Too much people thought after the death of her mother when she was only four years old, which must have exacerbated this her character. That s sensitivity became even more acute. Small emotional differences would overwhelm her completely. family members sometimes worried she was too fragile for the hardness of ordinary life. In another setting, such a temperament might have become completely disabling. The modern world rewards emotional armor, self assertion, detachment, resilience, which we understand as toughness. Santa possessed none of these. She felt everything too deeply. But grace didn't abolish her sensitivity, her oddness.

[00:06:26]Grace didn't turn into a harder or emotionally stable, invulnerable person.

[00:06:32]Grace entered precisely through that vulnerability.

[00:06:37]And it evolved, it changed, it transformed into a unique gift of spiritual perception that we get blessed, enabled by because she suffered inwardly from small humiliations and emotional wounds. She developed an extraordinary awareness of the hidden sufferings of others, things you and I wouldn't see, wouldn't notice, because she knew what helplessness felt like. She discovered radical dependence upon God. Because she couldn't rely upon her own strength, she abandoned herself to divine mercy with unusual purity. Out of that came what she called her little way, the sanctification not of dramatic achievements, but of littleness, trust, hidden sacrifices, and childlike confidence in God. What the world might have dismissed as weakness became the very soil in which her sanctity grew.

[00:07:35]Her hyper sensitivity became tenderness.

[00:07:37]Her vulnerability became compassion. Her emotional intensity became mystical insight. Now, as it happens, I've never found her very helpful. But I'm surrounded by people who adore her and find her. So for me, Theresa of Avil is more my kind of quirky saint. But she's another story entirely.

[00:07:59]It's what this is what precisely what Thomas Aquinas meant when he said, "Grace perfects nature." Grace didn't erase either TZ's personality. It fulfilled it. The very qualities that could have become for tres of lu neurosis or despair became well we use the word engine.

[00:08:18]Let's say channels of holiness. One could almost say God didn't work around her fragility.

[00:08:25]He wor with it. He worked through it.

[00:08:29]Now St. Jerome bad temper becoming intellectual ferocity. Jerome was not an easy man. He was brilliant, fiercely disciplined, deeply learned and notoriously sharp tonged. His letters are filled with sarcasm, cutting remarks, impatience, and devastating attacks on his opponents. He argued with theologians, bishops, former friends, rival scholars. Didn't matter who you were, he would argue with you. At times he seemed almost constitutionally incapable of avoiding conflict. One contemporary described him as a man whose pen dripped acid. Nowadays he would be a super contrarian.

[00:09:10]He possessed the kind of temperament that in ordinary life can make people exhausting company. Highly strong, intellectually combative, easily irritated by foolishness, relentless, unkind in argument. Jerome didn't suffer fools gladly. He f scarcely suffered them at all. But those same qualities became inseparable from what God wanted to use him for in his life, from his vocation. The fierce intensity that made him argumentative also made him tireless. The same temperament that drove him into controversy drove him into one of the greatest scholarly labors in Christian history. the translation of the scriptures into Latin, the lingua frana, the universal language in what became the vulgate Bible.

[00:09:57]That work required enormous intellectual stamina and competence. Jerome immersed himself in Hebrew and Greek at a time when few Western scholars mastered either. But I know myself that's really quite difficult. He worked with obsessive dedication, pouring over manuscripts, correcting texts, defending this interpretation over that because enduring criticism of which there was a lot, laboring for years in conditions of aesthetic simplicity in Bethlehem, a softer or more accommodating personality wouldn't have stuck with it. But he persevered.

[00:10:34]Sanctity in Jerome didn't subdue the temper. It gave the temper a target. His aggression became their zeal for truth.

[00:10:42]His combiveness became doctrinal vigilance. His restless intensity became scholarly endurance.

[00:10:50]And importantly, sanctity didn't make Jerome nice or pleasant. The rough edges remained visible. This is one of the encouraging things about him. The saints aren't polished personalities. Holiness is not the same as niceness. And niceness is not the same as holiness.

[00:11:11]Jerome's sanctity lay not in becoming temperamentally unrecognizable, but in allowing even his difficult qualities to be placed at the service of God. God didn't discard the fierce, difficult, argumentative man he created. He used that very fierceness for the preservation and transmission of his most holy word, his own word.

[00:11:36]St. Philip Ner.

[00:11:38]He was gloriously and unapologetically very very very odd at a time when many associated holiness with severity, somnity, public displays of religious seriousness.

[00:11:53]Philip cultivated joy, humor, spontaneity, even absurdity. He understood something profound about the human heart. That pride hardens it, but laughter softens it and cracks it wide open. So, he behaved in ways that often started people. He would shave off only half his beard before going out in public just to mock vanity, but really beginning with his own. At times, he wore ridiculous clothes or deliberately eccentric garments in order to prevent admiration attaching to himself. He played practical jokes. He interrupted pomposity with wit. He burst spontaneously into song. He could seem almost childlike in his playfulness.

[00:12:36]Some people called it childish. To more rigid personalities, he must occasionally have appeared unserious, even exasperating.

[00:12:45]But beneath the humor was an immense spiritual intelligence.

[00:12:51]He recognized that many of us become well really trapped by our own self-importance. It may not matter that it's an antidote to insecurity, but it that's what happens. Religious pride can become one of the greatest barriers to grace. People begin performing holiness instead of living it, doing everything in the appearance.

[00:13:13]By behaving unpredictably and humorously, Philip disarmed pretention both in himself and in others. His eccentricity was therefore not random theatricality, became pastoral energy.

[00:13:25]People were drawn to him because they felt safe in his presence. Isn't that lovely? Young men especially flocked to him in Rome because he radiated warmth and rather than cold moralism. You didn't feel criticized or put down by him.

[00:13:40]He made sanctity appear attractive, human and joyful. Underneath the jokes and oddity, there was, of course, deep prayer, profound wisdom, and an extraordinary compassion.

[00:13:53]What grace did with Philip's mischief was not to retire it, you might say, but to commission it. The same playfulness that in another person might have been mere attention-seeking became in Philip a way of loosening the grip of vanity, opening souls to God. God does not sanctify us by turning us into identical religious puppets or mannequins.

[00:14:14]Philip Ner rem remained unmistakably Philip Ner humorous, unconventional, exuberant, idiosyncratic, unpredictable.

[00:14:24]And precisely through those qualities, he became one of the great spiritual fathers of the church.

[00:14:29]He's a marvelous antidote to the false notion that holiness means becoming grim. In Philip Ner, joy itself becomes a form of sanctity. Well, let's add one or two just for the sake of variety. St. Jonavar, I love her. She wasn't moderately naturally moderate. I mean, just think a peasant girl upending the politics of Europe just because she heard God speak to her.

[00:14:55]From the very beginning, there was something overwhelming about her personality. She was intense. She was stubborn. She was visionary. She wasn't afraid. As a peasant girl from rural France, she possessed none of the social credentials and they really mattered in those days that should have allowed her to command armies as she did, confront princes, shape the destiny of nations, even ones she didn't believe live in.

[00:15:19]And she behaved with a certainty that astonished everyone around her. That certainty made people deeply uncomfortable.

[00:15:26]She heard what they called what she called voices. She insisted they were from God. She refused to retreat from what she believed she'd been shown. And the circumstances and the miracles proved her right. Learned clerics interrogated her. Cordiers mocked her.

[00:15:43]Soldiers of course looked down her and doubted her. Politicians tried to manipulate her. But she survived it all.

[00:15:51]One can easily imagine how in another setting a temperament as hers might have become destructive or fanatical.

[00:15:58]Obstinency can harden into arrogance.

[00:16:00]Intensity can become instability.

[00:16:03]Fearlessness can become recklessness.

[00:16:06]But you might say grace entered precisely into those fierce qualities and transformed them into a heroic vocation. Only someone like Joan could have done what God needed doing through her.

[00:16:22]Without extraordinary stubbornness, she'd never survived the pressures placed on her. An ordinary personality would have collapsed under ridicule or intimidation long before reaching a Dufans's court. None of us could have done it. A more compliant soul would have accepted a judgment of powerful men and gone quietly back to village life.

[00:16:40]But she possessed the terrifying strength of someone who believed obedience to God she loved mattered much more than obedience to human fear.

[00:16:49]The same unbending certainty that made her threatening to judges and politicians made her incap made her capable of in inspiring exhausted French troops who'd almost forgotten how to hope. Her fearlessness restored courage to a broken and divided nation. The peasant girl who wouldn't bend became improbably the savior almost the creator of France.

[00:17:14][sighs] And even at her trial abandoned and condemned, the same fierce integrity remained visible. disappeared for a short while and then came back. Her judges repeatedly tried to t trap or intimidate her. Yet she answered each with astonishing clarity and composure for a young educated woman facing the flames.

[00:17:33]Joan wasn't made gentler. She was made true. Her stubbornness became fidelity.

[00:17:40]Her fierceness courage. Her refusal to yield sanctity. She is therefore a powerful example of the truth that holiness is not the destruction of the personality that God gave us. God takes the very traits that the world finds excessive or inconvenient and wants to smooth them into uniformity and turns them into infinite instruments of his pro providence. And that brings us to St. Thomas Aquinas himself.

[00:18:08]I don't expect you know much about Thomas Aquinas. those of you who don't, and apologies to those of you who do and know more than me.

[00:18:18]See, the thing is, as a young man, he wasn't at all impressive. He was physically large, clumsy, quiet, slowmoving, and remarkably silent in company.

[00:18:30]Among the more brilliant and verbally agile students around him, he appeared awkward, unremarkable.

[00:18:36]So, they called him, they gave him a nickname. They called him the dumb ox.

[00:18:40]They mistook his silence for stupidity, his heaviness for lack of intelligence.

[00:18:46]But he was thinking in a culture that admires quickness, Thomas didn't seem gifted. He wasn't dazzling. He wasn't dominant. He didn't produce kind of rapid fire brilliance people immediately instinctively associate with genius.

[00:19:03]But what others interpreted as slowness was in fact depth. Extraordinary depth.

[00:19:08]Some minds move rapidly across the surface of things. Thomas had a mind that descended. He lingered. He absorbed. He contemplated. He penetr and and he penetrated questions layer by layer until he reached their roots. His silence was concentration. While others were reacting quickly, Thomas was thinking metaphysically.

[00:19:32]His teacher Albert the Great recognizes long before others did. When students mocked Thomas as a dumb ox, Albert famously replied, "You may call him the dumbox, but one day his bellowing is going to fill the world." And it did even now.

[00:19:51]His contemplative temperament became one of the greatest theological instruments in Christian history. Thomas produced an immense body of work marked not only by intellectual power by extraordinary calmness and order. His thought doesn't rush unfolds patiently, carefully distinguishing, balancing, clarifying.

[00:20:12]Well, God didn't soften Thomas. He deepened him. God didn't make him flamboyant, magnetic, dramatic. Instead, grace perfected the nature already present within him because his inwardness became contemplation. His silence became wisdom and slowness profoundity.

[00:20:30]Indeed, one suspects that without precisely those qualities, he wouldn't have written and thought what he did. We often confuse speed with intelligence.

[00:20:41]Thomas reminds us that the deepest truth are sometimes grasped not by the quickest mind, but by the most contemplative one.

[00:20:49]And once again, this is the heart of the principle that grace takes our nature and makes things better using it. God doesn't just tolerate our human particularity. He frequently builds sanctity through it. The very traits others dismissed in Thomas became the means by which he illuminated the intellectual life of the church for centuries.

[00:21:11]What about St. Katherine of Sienna? In a world that values women imitating men, women grabbing for power in order to feel important and influential. Look at Katherine.

[00:21:24]Because as even as a young woman, there was something really extraordinary intense about her which couldn't be contained within the extraordinary expectations of personality or behavior.

[00:21:34]She prayed fiercely, fasted severely, spoke with startling directness. She lived with a kind of burning inward energy that unsettled many people around her. She didn't do things moderately, not nice. Her emotional and spiritual life seemed to operate at full voltage. She wept easily. She spoke passionately. She threw herself into prayer and penance with astonishing totality. In ordinary society, well, people like that get regarded as excessive, over the top, too much, too emotional, too driven, too absolute. And there were plenty of people in her own lifetime who found her alarming. But Grace, the Holy Spirit didn't diminish her intensity. God didn't smooth her out into a more socially manageable figure. Instead, he transformed that fierce energy into prophetic authority.

[00:22:28]The same passionate temperament that might otherwise have consumed her in anxiety or extremism unbridled became fuel for spiritual courage. Catherine began addressing priests, rulers, civic leaders, and eventually even the pope himself. With astonishing boldness, it was a time of corruption, division, and paralysis within both church and society. It needed her to speak with fearless urgency of someone compelled by divine conviction.

[00:22:59]Most remarkably, this young woman, no status, no mechanism, no structure to hide behind or to to launch her, no formal education, no institutional power, became influential enough in her own right, through her own integrity, to urge Pope Gregory the 11th to leave Avenon, return the papacy to Rome. Can you imagine what kind of personality it required to do that? Her intensity also gave her an unusual spiritual penetration. She saw suffering vividly.

[00:23:34]She loved intensely and spoke of Christ not as an abstraction but as someone inwardly and personally intimately known. Her writings burn with emotional immediacy because her whole personality had been caught by love and was in flame.

[00:23:56]Sanctity in Katherine was not the cooling of her fire. It was her consecration.

[00:24:01]Her emotional intensity became compassion. Her urgency turned into mission. Her in inability to remain passive became her prophetic vocation.

[00:24:13]Thomas St. Thomas says grace perfects nature. Kathine's one of the clearest examples of this. God didn't reject her intensity or bypass it as inconvenient.

[00:24:24]He sanctified it and turned it outward for the renewal of the church. The very qualities that might have made her seem excessive in ordinary life became under grace instruments again of holiness and reform of church and society.

[00:24:40]Well, perhaps one of the saddest features of secular culture is the pressure it places upon people to become the same, to become interchangeable.

[00:24:50]Everything presses towards conformity.

[00:24:53]The markets do, bureaucracy does, ideology, fashion, where everyone looks the same, public opinion, even social media. We're encouraged to smooth away the in inconvenient edges of our own personality in order that we might become manageable, predictable, and easily classified.

[00:25:11]The modern world likes human beings standardized. I suppose it's a byproduct of industrialization.

[00:25:19]But the kingdom moves in the opposite direction. Saints are not mass proet they're not mass saints are not mass- prodduced moral units.

[00:25:31]They are startlingly luminously themselves. Augustine remains intellectually restless. Jerome burns with ferocity. Francis overflows with joy. Philip nearly laughs non-stop. Tus tumbles but trusts. Joon of art blazes with certainty. Katherine can't be told to be quiet.

[00:25:52]Grace doesn't erase our personalities.

[00:25:55]They're redeemed by it. We're purified without being sterilized. We're elevated without being flattened. Indeed, one of the marks of sanctity is it's often the opposite of uniformity. It is the mysterious flowering of individuality.

[00:26:09]No two fingerprints under the love of God. The closer the saints come to God, the more distinct they become, not less, because God is not repetitive. Divi divine creativity does not produce copies. No two leaves are identical. No two fingerprints repeat themselves.

[00:26:26]Unlike concrete blocks, we're different from each other.

[00:26:30]Which means that the some of the things we spend our lives apologizing for intensity, sensitivity, oddness, inwardness, restlessness under the grace of the Holy Spirit become precisely the place where God chooses to dwell most effectively, not despite them, through them, with them, because of them.