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David and I met years ago through a mutual friend. The first time we spoke was on the phone and we talked about God for half an hour. He mentioned that he had some facial deformity, and I thought, well, whatever, and we talked some more. Then he came to my church, and it turns out he has the most severe facial deformities I've ever seen.

He was born with an extensive and benign tumor on the bottom left quadrant of his face, which surgeons tried to remove when he was very young. In the process, they removed his lower lip, and then gave him such extensive radiation that the lower part of his face stopped growing, and he was covered with plum-colored burns.

He is 55 now, with silvery hair and bright blue eyes.

Last week I saw him in performance at a local community center at a benefit for the refugees in Kosovo. He was wearing a dress shirt in plum purple, which exemplifies the kind of tender and jaunty bravery with which I have come to associate him. He stepped out onstage before a hundred grown-ups and a dozen children, and stood smiling while people got a good look. Then he suggested we ask him, in a conversational tone and in unison, "David, what happened to your face?" When we did, he explained about the tumor, the surgery and all those radiation burns.

He told of wanting to form a gang of the coolest disfigured people in the world, like the Phantom, the Beast from "Beauty and the Beast," Freddie Krueger and Michael Jackson. They'd go places as a group -- bowling, perhaps, or to one of the make-over counters at the next Macy's White Flower Day Sale.

"People assume I had an awful childhood," he continued. "But I didn't. I was loved and esteemed by my parents. My face may be unique, but my experiences aren't. I believe they are universal."

Wouldn't you think that having that thing on his face totally messed with his adolescent sex life? Of course it did, he said. And he was a little fat too, a chubby little disfigured guy. But these things were not nearly as detrimental as having been raised Catholic; having been, as he put it, an incense survivor.

Telling his stories through a crazy mouth, a jumble of teeth, only one lip and a too-large tongue, David's voice did not sound garbled but strangely like a brogue; like that of a Scottish person who just had a shot of Novocain.

"We with facial deformities are children of the dark," he said. "Our shadow is on the outside. And we can see in the dark: We can see you, we see you turn away, but one day we finally understand that you turn away not from our faces but from your own fears. From those things inside you that you think mark you as someone unlovable to your family, and society and even to God.

"All those years, I kept my bad stories in the dark, but not anymore. Now I am stepping out into the light. And this face has turned out to be an elaborately disguised gift from God."

He spoke of the hidden scary scarred parts inside us all, the soul disfigurement, the fear deep inside that we're unacceptable; and while he spoke, his hands moved fluidly in expressions that his face can't make. His hands are beautiful, fair, light as air, light as a ballet dancer's.

He told of his first game of spin-the-bottle, when the girl who was chosen to kiss him recoiled in horror, and he said to her, debonairly, "You know you want me." Then he admits sheepishly that he didn't actually say that for 20 years, but that in soul-time, it's never too late. He told of loving a teenage girl named Carol, of how it took months to ask her out, but that when he did, she accepted. They went to the movies and then afterwards sat on a couch on his front porch, and he kept trying to put his arm around her but couldn't quite, so they talked and talked and talked. He wanted to kiss her but was too shy to ask; he was afraid it was like asking her to kiss a monster, and finally she said, "I need to walk on home now," and he said, "Carol, I want to kiss you," and she said, "David? I thought you'd never ask."

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