Fortunately, God Loves Losers, Outcasts And The Quirky
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(OPINION) Since Cardinal Robert Prevost, 69, became the first American elected as pope, I’ve been racking my mind trying to find something semi-intelligent to write about this momentous event.
What I’ve come up with is, “Congratulations to the new Pope Leo XIV.”
Not even semi-intelligent, that.
Let me assure you, I love the Roman Catholic Church and have a host of Catholic friends. I’m an amateur student of Catholic mysticism. And my wife keeps saying that if I ever retire as a minister she might very well convert to Catholicism.
But there are several reasons I find myself drawing a blank, pope-wise.
First, I’m not Catholic. I’m the lowest of low-church Protestants, a real, live Holy Roller. I don’t have a clue what Pope Leo might mean to the church’s future.
Second, all my favorite writers about religion — including David French of the New York Times and Michelle Boorstein of the Washington Post — as well as scores of other competent journalists worldwide, have weighed in on the matter. Even if I went out and did a week’s worth of old-fashioned, shoe-leather reporting, I doubt I’d discover anything that would add a lick to the reams of stories already filed.
Third, and this is the kicker, across the many years I’ve practiced journalism, I’ve always found this disconcerting quirk in my brain: the minute 100 other reporters descend on a Big Story, I instantly lose interest in it. I find myself congenitally unable to follow a herd.
If some ill-advised news outfit had seen fit to fly me to Rome to cover the papal conclave, I’d probably have come home with a profile of the guy who drives the popemobile. Or a feature about the Vatican flunky who orders late-night pizzas for the cardinals. Or a piece on the HR employee who screens applicants for the Pontifical Swiss Guard.
There’s something wrong with me. I’ve spent most of my life as a misfit, the guy standing on the outside of the fence looking in at all the cool, smart, pretty people.
I’m not a contrarian. Some guys cast themselves as proud rebels or iconoclasts to draw attention. That’s not me. I’d love joining the in-crowd. I like being liked.
But in high school, when the other football players were banging their heads against lockers to get their warrior hormones all jacked up before we went out for a kickoff, I sat in the corner thinking, “It’s a high school ballgame, boys. We’re not facing the Wehrmacht. It’s not the fate of the world at stake.”
Later, as my college buddies earned degrees in finance or law and went on to lucrative careers and country club memberships, I got not one but two degrees in English literature. I couldn’t make a living, but buddy I could explicate the heck out of a John Donne poem.
As my former Southern Baptist friends converted into wine-bibbing Episcopalians, I became a Pentecostal and started talking in tongues. And preaching to boot. Yet my fellow Pentecostals tend to consider me too much of a free-thinker — or just too much, period.
There’s something awry in my head that zigs when everybody else zags. I can’t explain it and can’t stop it. I’m weird. Not weird for the sake of being weird, as I said, just weird.
Here’s the part that applies to you, even if you don’t speak in tongues or try to write about popes.
Recently, in an online Bible study podcast, I learned the word “mamzer.”
“Mamzer is Hebrew (and Yiddish) for ‘bastard,’” a Chabad website explains. It’s “a very derogatory reference to a difficult or unpleasant individual.”
Colloquially, mamzer apparently can also refer to anybody regarded as strange or an outsider.
That would be me. In that sense I’m definitely a mamzer. And maybe that’s you, too, if you’re of a certain bent.
We’re those odd souls who see things differently than the crowd does, maybe because we’re always a healthy distance from it.
According to Marty Solomon, the podcast host I first heard use the word (he’s a Christian of Jewish extraction), in Bible stories, mamzers often are chosen for special missions and insights. Mamzers start out as outcasts but end up as heroes.
Think of Gideon, the puniest man in the least tribe of Israel, who’s bizarrely called to lead an army against the vastly superior Midianites.
Or Mary, a teenage virgin whose betrothal hasn’t been consummated when she finds herself pregnant.
Or Matthew, a hated tax gatherer and sellout to Roman occupiers, who for no discernible reason is picked by Jesus as an apostle.
Their very differentness leaves them more willing to accept God’s grace than some of their contemporaries are. They know they can’t do much on their own, so they depend on the Lord. They’re unafraid of losing face because they have no face to lose.
It’s one of the many varieties of paradoxes the Bible is full of. Here, God takes the oddest thing about someone, and turns it, literally, into a superpower.
There’s hope, it seems, for all of us. Maybe being strange is a back-handed gift from above. At least I want to think of it that way.
Paul Prather has been a rural Pentecostal pastor in Kentucky for more than 40 years. Also a journalist, he was The Lexington Herald-Leader’s staff religion writer in the 1990s, before leaving to devote his full time to the ministry. He now writes a regular column about faith and religion for the Herald-Leader, where this column first appeared. Prather’s written four books. You can email him at pratpd@yahoo.com.