Listen to The Stoke
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Don’t Fear Being an Outsider
In our culture, the loudest voices win. At least that’s what we think. And that’s what we’re told.
How are we told? Through the constant rewarding of those who self-promote, who tell the public what we should think, how to live and act, what to believe and who to believe in.
Fall in line, keep the status quo. And, since so many of us desire to be in the ‘in crowd’ we listen.
But there is another way. The way of the outsider.
“But Tim,” you say, “It’s okay to desire acceptance. Surely you’re not suggesting we drift out of the cultural discussion, live as hermits and eschew acceptance by others.
“Ah yes,” I reply. “Indeed, our desire for acceptance is good. But if we feed our desire on the popular and end up changing our true selves in order to be accepted, then I’m afraid we’ve drifted from our intended purpose as created beings. We should always remain ourselves even in the face of pressure to be accepted.”
C.S. Lewis said, “Until you conquer the fear of being an outsider, an outsider you will remain.” Lewis, speaking to undergraduates at King’s College London in 1944 warned the students about the temptation to get on the inside, to be well-liked by the people who seem to "matter most" in society. Lewis himself was considered by some as an outsider in the Oxford world.
Lewis’s exhortation came with marching orders, as it were: stay busy honing your craft, become great in your own fields and care less for what the so-called "Inner Ring" is up to, and care more about your own work and your own friends.
I reread this little address quite often as a reminder to keep my head down, do "the work" before me, and to surround myself with the people I really like, rather than the people I'm supposed to like.
We all want to be included; we all want to feel appreciated. But you and I can end up sacrificing precious things if we blindly pursue this Inner Ring. Things like:
Sound thinking for pop-theology
True spiritual affection for cause crusading
Our integrity ransomed to gain influence
Loving relationships for transactional ones
Diverse relationships for relationships with people who only think like us
It's the desire to be included that drives us towards the Inner Ring. And that drive can wreck us. Being an outsider, for Lewis, is a matter of perspective.
Lewis's perspective is, "Hang it all, I'll do my own thing, rather than give up whatever it takes to get in with the Inner Ring.”
Here’s a quick hack for living life as an outsider: realize that God appreciates us. When we realize that we possess a certain glory before him, then the desire to be included with the so-called popular crowd fades.
In front of God all that matters, then, is to get to work, find good friends, and have at it.
When we live like this, we become like another who lived his life as an outsider; a man who, though on the outside of society, created his own Inner Ring. Jesus was the original outsider.
Lewis reminds us that when we pursue friendship and happiness in this way, we end up creating our own Inner Ring. I’ll close with Lewis’s encouragement:
The quest for the inner ring will break your hearts unless you break it. But if you break it, a surprising result will follow. If in your working hours you make the work your end, you will presently find yourself all unawares inside the only circle in your profession that really matters.
You will be one of the sound craftsmen, and other sound craftsmen will know it. This group of craftsmen will by no means coincide with the Inner Ring or the Important People or the People in the Know.
But it will do those things which that profession exists to do and will in the long run be responsible for all the respect which that profession in fact enjoys and which the speeches and advertisements cannot maintain.
And if in your spare time you consort simply with the people you like, you will again find that you have come unawares to a real inside, that you are indeed sung and safe at the centre of something which, seen from without, would look exactly like an Inner Ring.
But the difference is that its secrecy is accidental, and its exclusiveness a by-product, and no one was led thither by the lure of the esoteric, for it is only four or five people who like one another meeting to do things they like. This is friendship.
Stay stoked my friends.
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