My Silly Hat

I own a peculiar baseball cap that I wear all the time. It’s a black hat, simple in appearance, save for the goofy-looking pinkish blob prominently featured above the rim. The blob is smiling, tongue out, with its big googly eyes wide and staring and happy. The blob has a name; it’s Morph. And Morph is a minor character from the largely forgotten 2002 Disney animated film Treasure Planet. This amorphous little blob is the wily companion of the film’s antagonist, Captain John Silver. Morph doesn’t speak, but he can morph into anything, which sets up a number of movie shenanigans.

I can count on one hand the number of people who, upon seeing that hat atop my head, point and say, “Oh! Treasure Planet, right?” Of those five people, two of them have been able to call to mind the name Morph. Mostly, my hat earns me curious glances, dozens of eye rolls, and the inevitable exacerbated sigh as an innocent question results in a detailed explanation of a film no one cares to remember.

Why wear it? Donning little Morph atop my head does me few favors. I don’t look cool, cultured, or particularly grounded. At best, I come off as eccentric or certainly odd. What am I trying to prove?

Well, nothing. I love that hat. I love that film. When I encounter another person out there in the wide world who shares that love of a story of space pirates, we are instantly bonded. Maybe that’s why I wear that hat: as a beacon to call others across the bridge of my peculiar love of story.

In the Ignatian tradition, we insist that God is in all things. It’s a breathtaking claim. We glimpse and learn something of God in each and every thing around us. It’s so incredible as to be overwhelming. We can’t take it all in, so we collapse individual details into general concepts. We aggregate ideas. We skip past the sights we see every day.

God is in that oak tree, sure, but I saw that yesterday and have places to be.

That’s why we need the unusual. Tiny, obscure details jar us out of our routines. They cause us to stop, puzzle, and wonder. Our shoes skid to a halt—even if just for a moment—as we do a double take, circle back, and ensure our eyes have not deceived us. God is here, too. God is in the bizarre and the extraordinary. God speaks to us, inviting us to a disposition of curiosity, shared awe, and laughter.

Is that why I wear that silly hat? Perhaps. I don’t claim that an encounter with my Treasure Planet cap instigates a religious experience. But it does stir in others questions. It presents an opening for shared story. It’s unusual and so causes those sneakers to skid to a stop and heads to whip around in a confused double take.

“What’s on your hat?”

There are those rare encounters when Morph is recognized, and Treasure Planet is celebrated. But more often, naming the quirkiness of my cap is an invitation to the questioners to mine their own stories for eccentric details. To offer up their own weird anecdotes. To laugh and wonder and shake their heads.

We need the weird and the wonderful to spark a conversation.

God is in all things, but it’s too easy to coast by and get lost in an amorphous god that’s everywhere but not really anywhere. We need silly specificity to ground us. We need the weird and the wonderful to spark a conversation, to lead to an Aha!, and to provide the bridge of story across which we walk to meet another.

In the sharing of the story, community blossoms. And God, Three-in-One, always delights in that.