In his Frenzy of Renown, Leo Braudy describes fame as, "the interplay between the common and the unique in human nature."  In other words, to be famous is to occupy a holding pattern between human commonality and individual uniqueness.  Famous people are not unique; they have rather managed to straddle the fine line between what is and what can be.  They hold up our oneness, they hold up our individuality of vision; they help us see our possibilities, good or bad.
     Russia's Ivan the Terrible was famous, famous for showing us one vision, a rather twisted one, of human possibility.  Francis of Assisi was famous for giving us another vision, this one of human goodness, the extent to which humans are capable of serving each other.  Both of these people echoed, one negatively, the other, positively, this middle ground, this holding space between commonality and uniqueness.  In their own way, they've given us ideas about where we might want--or not want--to go.
     Some people of faith lament that Adam and Eve (and similar characters in parallel stories from the ancient world) made the wrong choice in the Garden.  They wonder why God had to arrange the Tree of Life and the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil as he did.  They question why he allowed them to make a poor choice.
     God didn't want robots on the planet.  He wanted people who were able and willing to think for themselves, people who, though they recognized their commonality, wished to carve out a vision unique to themselves.  Although God is surely disappointed with many of humanity's choices (and this is why, after all, Jesus died on the cross, to propitiate God's dissatisfaction in this regard and, in so doing, redeem humankind from its moral bondage), and many of us are aghast at the people who have become famous, we can recognize in them something central to human dignity.  We are born to be in common, yet we are born to be individuals.  We are born to remember our fellow humans even while we give each other visions of the possibilities of human individuality.
     We are born to step outside our normative parameters and find our place, our place that, we hope, will encourage others to find theirs, too. 
     We are born to find, in the inexhaustibility of a divinely moral universe, our deepest dream.