Ordinary People

I had experiences recently with what might be called "the extraordinary ordinary," a term I coined after reading over half a million Communion letters from common, everyday people who’d had what can only be called transformative experiences with some sort of alternative life form. It all started with a visit from the powerful psychic Glennys Mackay, who stopped off in LA, along with her husband George, after a cruise from Australia.

Now Glennys is ANYTHING but "ordinary," and yet in many ways, she IS a very ordinary person. She is not sophisticated: she likes to email funny jokes and cartoons to her friends. When she gets a psychic "hit," she simply announces it matter-of-factly, with none of the "woo woo" fanfare a less talented medium might use. I guess you might call Glennys "the ordinary extraordinary."

We wanted to take the MacKays to a place they had never been before, since it turned out they had seen all the usual tourist spots in the city on previous trips. We decided to go to the Getty Museum, which has a lovely restaurant. It also has a very crowded garage. We paid our $8 to park when we entered, so we KNEW there was a parking spot there SOMEWHERE, but since it was wall-to-wall cars, we weren’t sure we’d be able to find it. Then Glennys suddenly said, "There’s a white car leaving right now on the next level," so we zoomed up and found a white car backing out at that very moment. I whispered to Whitley, "You need to be a psychic to find a parking spot in this town!"

A few days later, we went to a breakfast at our new church, because we wanted to explore the volunteer options there. I sometimes spend Christmas or Thanksgiving without my family and I wanted to investigate feeding the homeless during those times.

When we went in, we were given name tags and moved from group to group, in a form of musical chairs. When I first saw this, I was dismayed, but then I cheered up, because I met more "extraordinary ordinary" people there than I’ve met in any one place in a long time. I met a gay man who said he felt welcome there. I met a divorced woman who discovered that the man she loved had only a month to live, so she wanted to get an annulment so she could marry him in the Catholic church before he died. The priest said there was no way he could rush the annulment through, but he told her to follow her heart and they were married by her new father-in- law, who turned out to be a Lutheran minister. Tears began running down my cheeks as she told her story, and I decided I really liked the way that "rules" and dogma were not held to be more important than people’s needs.

Impressed as I was by all the ordinary, selfless people I had just met, I went to a lecture that night, where I was greeted with a big hug by a woman I had never met who was instrumental in saving my life three years ago. She heard Whitley talking about my burst aneurysm on the Art Bell show, and called a doctor she knew, who managed to get me transferred to the best hospital in town, where an extraordinary neurologist worked tirelessly to save my life. Despite her courageous intervention on my behalf, she would definitely describe herself as an "ordinary" person.

Then one of the speakers began going on and on about how ordinary people are dumb, lazy, selfish, ineffective, etc. His message was so poisonous that several people there actually started to feel nauseous. I thought, "Does this man KNOW any ordinary people? I’m so glad I do!"

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