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How so? It’s obvious that the world is full of ordinary people.  About seven and one-half billion of them. How can it be said that none of them are ordinary? 

Well, consider the word, ‘ordinary’. It means nothing unique, nothing special, nothing to distinguish something from something else, and if you are in the middle of a crowd, that’s what you may look like, an ordinary person. But there are considerations that justify Lewis’ claim.

1. Do you feel ordinary? Do you think you are the same as everyone else? When you are standing in line at the store or walking down a crowded or not so crowded street or driving along through any neighborhood or town, do you look at someone and think, “There is someone just like me, inside and outside, just like me.”?  No, you don’t. You are somehow aware of your inner self, deep in the infinite depths of your heart and mind, and that self is unique, special, not like any other self. You do not believe yourself to be like everyone else; you do not regard yourself as another box on the shelf, another pebble on the beach. No one does.

2. And I believe Lewis had also something else in mind. Being Lewis, he thought of each person as a unique creation of God, a separate entity, unlike any other of that seven and one-half billion or any other before or since or anything. As George MacDonald (Lewis’s mentor) said, everything is unique “Bees and butterflies, moths and dragonflies, the flowers and the brooks and the clouds.” Further, in the depths of the material world, in the quantum world, apparently everything is unique.

Whoever you are, therefore, whether in terms natural or divine or both, you are not ordinary.