The Boy who became a Pastor

by DRM

Last week a man was killed in a car crash in Uganda.

He was a pastor.

He was also one of the most mean-spirited and vicious peo­ple I have ever encoun­tered in my life. He made me ques­tion what Evil was.

His death has prompted an out­pour­ing of sor­row from peo­ple touched by his min­istry and those he had encoun­tered along his life. He leaves behind a wife and three daugh­ters, a pas­toral mis­sion of renew­ing and cel­e­brat­ing mar­riage and the indeli­ble imprint in my mem­ory of his defi­ant pock­marked face as I car­ried my win­ter jacket out of my dor­mi­tory room to remove the stench of urine, soda and the rot­ting bird car­cass that he had left in its pocket.

We were in eighth grade. It was the sec­ond semes­ter of our first year at an exclu­sive boys’ board­ing school in New Eng­land. We were the youngest boys. The school was run by the Bene­dic­tine Order, a group of catholic priests and pro­fes­sors who lived monas­tic lives of prayer, con­tem­pla­tion and good works.

The Boy who would grow up to be a Pas­tor was from Morn­ing­side Heights in New York. He was a schol­ar­ship stu­dent. I was a fac­ulty brat, the son of an Eng­lish teacher. I was a schol­ar­ship student.

The Boy who had become a Pas­tor tar­geted me as an easy mark that he could taunt and bully.  I didn’t know how to defend myself.

I ran, hid, evaded, eluded, mis­di­rected, equiv­o­cated, denied, delayed, deceived, detered, deflected, per­se­ver­ated.  I watched the pack from a dis­tance as they prowled through the lower cam­pus search­ing for me.   The Boy who would become a Pas­tor prowled at the front, ges­tur­ing and point­ing, his chest pushed out and his face twisted into a con­trived grin.

He was mis­shapen and per­verse in his phys­i­cal aspect. When he stripped naked in the shower, we saw his sunken chest and thick shoul­ders, the rolls of his waist hang­ing over a crooked penis and stringy thighs.  He over­came those imped­i­ments.  He was cun­ning and  unfor­giv­ing, impe­ri­ous and cer­tain. He was mean.  He was vain.

One boy in our class didn’t have the skills to slip by the mob. He was fair skinned and slight. He was still young when he came to the school. He liked to build model air­planes. He brought a few. He spent time work­ing on new ones in the evening. He kept the fin­ished planes on the top shelf of his cubby.

Think­ing back now, I can imag­ine how excited he must have been to bring his prizes to school. He’d have had an idea — encour­aged by the mate­ri­als the school sent us in the months before we started — that he’d find a club to do his projects with, or that he could start a club himself.

That first semes­ter hadn’t been in ses­sion more than a month when I saw the model planes come fly­ing out of the sec­ond floor win­dow and crash to bits on the asphalt road below. I could hear the Boy who became a Pas­tor taunt­ing, “Do they fly? Let’s see them fly.” After all the planes had been thrown out the win­dow,  the feral crowd growled and the boy screamed and whim­pered. The other boys began to clap and cheer. The whim­per­ing changed to cries of pain and panic. They came march­ing out the front door of the dorm. The boy was sus­pended on a broom stick threaded through his under­wear. The seat was wedged deep into his naked but­tocks.  He was in agony. They marched off down the road. I slunk away in the other direc­tion. I couldn’t under­stand what I had seen. The Boy who would become a Pas­tor was at the cen­ter of the group, one of the ringleaders.

The boy they had wedgied with­drew from school the next week. He had been broken.

By the time the Boy who would become a Pas­tor had uri­nated on my win­ter jacket, poured soda all along the lin­ing and put a dead bird in the pocket, I’d been forced to acknowl­edge my own kind of withdrawal.

The sum­mer before start­ing my first year at the school, I’d been swept away by my imag­i­na­tion.  My fam­ily had moved to the school the year before from our home in a swampy sec­tion of south­ern Mass­a­chus­setts, a down-trodden part of New Eng­land that was blinded to its long his­tory by the mean require­ments of cob­bling together a liv­ing.  It didn’t mat­ter that Miles Stan­dish had bought Mass­a­chu­setts from Chief Mas­sas­oit in the back yard of the town doctor’s farm.  It mat­tered that the only jobs around were in the prison where the Boston Stran­gler was locked up, that the dairy farms couldn’t keep in busi­ness, that the cran­berry sea­son was too short, that the small man­u­fac­tur­ers couldn’t stay com­pet­i­tive and that too many boys were going off to South­east Asia and com­ing back wrapped the bril­liant red, white and blues of the Amer­i­can flag.  The peo­ple took on the qual­ity of the land, its stubby trees, sandy soil, deep, murky swamps, grav­elly stream beds, long shal­low ponds.

When my father came home and told us we were mov­ing to the place by the bay where the hori­zon ran long, the sun­sets were bril­liant, the wind blew fresh and steady, and the monks ren­dered their loy­alty to God through the ven­er­a­tion of books and arts and learn­ing, I felt like I was being dropped into a world I had only read about.  When it came time to enter the school for my first year, I believed with all my heart that I was being ini­ti­ated into a spe­cial Order.

To pre­pare, I went with my par­ents to buy new cloth­ing.  We had the list from the school:  dress shirts, cor­duroys, flan­nel pants, blue blaz­ers with the school shield, ties, dress pants.  This was the uni­form of casual priv­i­lege, the cloth­ing that sig­nalled you were a mem­ber of the order, cloth­ing that I’d only seen the LL Bean or in the pro­mo­tional lit­er­a­ture of the bet­ter schools.

We spent more than we could afford on the cloth­ing, more than we’d ever spent on my cloth­ing before.  The win­ter coat was a spe­cial allowance.  I had seen the boys at the school wear­ing them the win­ter before: bulky parkas with fur around the hood and a long zip­per that cre­ated a fun­nel around your face when it was fully drawn.  The parka had spe­cial pock­ets, diag­o­nal lines above the square pock­ets on the front, and small pock­ets on the outer arms and inner lining.

The first day of school I dressed in my new clothes and went off to my ori­en­ta­tion.  When I sat with my new class­mates, I under­stood that I was dif­fer­ent in ways that I couldn’t com­pre­hend.  The clothes told the story:  we all looked the same at a glance, but closer scrutiny revealed the syn­thetic fibers in my blazer, the rough cut of the seam on my flan­nel pants, the glue used to bind the uppers and soles of my shoes.

The Boy who would become a Pas­tor was dressed as rudely as me.  He under­stood what it meant to be wear­ing your entire closet, to be fak­ing your way into the club.  But where I pulled back in fear I would be found out, he forced his way for­ward.  He would show every­one how to strike out at weak­ness, that power was the true fab­ric of the group’s nature, not the weave of the clothes.

When the Boy who would become a Pas­tor destroyed my win­ter coat, he knew that he was destroy­ing the last hope I had of being one of the group.  I came in the next week with a coat that I had found at the Army-Navy Sur­plus store for a few dol­lars, an over­sized, weather-beaten parka rated for sub-zero tem­per­a­tures.  It was dis­tinc­tive and an admis­sion that I was an imposter.

We spent five years together at the school.  We never became friends.  We tol­er­ated each other grudg­ingly.  When I went to New York to col­lege, we bumped into each other occa­sion­ally in Morn­ing­side Heights.  There was no affec­tion.  Then we lost touch.

A few years ago, I found him on Face­book.  He’d moved out west and become a Pas­tor.  He had a church.  He was an advo­cate for the sanc­tity of mar­riage.  He had thick­ened.  The pock­marks on his face were darker.  His shoul­ders were heavy and his hands like slabs of meat.  His wife was shorter than him, squarer, and in their pho­tos he would lay his arm across her shoul­der like a yoke.  Some of the pho­tos showed him preach­ing, his bar­rel chest swelled with force, his hand point­ing into the air in an excla­ma­tion of authority.

The pho­tos left me cold.

I ques­tioned my rejec­tion of his moral author­ity.  He had been mean to me as a young boy when we had both been put in an alien place — why couldn’t he have found peace by open­ing his heart to God?

I could not believe that because I don’t believe that we change.  I am the man that the boy I was would become.  My essence — the way that I see the world, the way that I expe­ri­ence other peo­ple, the things that make my heart swell, that make me go cold inside — is no dif­fer­ent today than 40 years ago.

The changes that we expe­ri­ence as we move from our youth to old age are the adap­ta­tions we make to get the things that we want.  None of us want to be out­casts.  None of us want to be afraid.  We learn, as we grow, how to mit­i­gate our impulses in order to be able to achieve the things that we want.

I knew the Boy who would become a Pas­tor.  He wanted power.  He wanted con­trol.  He wanted atten­tion.  He wanted author­ity.  And  he would use the weak­nesses in oth­ers to jus­tify to achieve those ends, regard­less of the pain it caused.

The Pas­tor who led his min­istry of mar­riage was that same boy.  I could not believe that he had changed.

As I read the memo­ri­als to his life posted by his fol­low­ers on Face­book, I felt the impulse to add the per­spec­tive of my own experience.

Then I read a mes­sage to her dead father from one of his daughters.

“Thank you Daddy for lov­ing me so much and always car­ing the best for me. Thank you for rais­ing me in such a Godly atmos­phere and thank you do much for always push­ing me to do my best. I love you so much Daddy. Thank you for the life I got to spend with you. No one could ever ask for any­one bet­ter to be in their life. You were truly a bless­ing to have as a father.

Although I wish I could have had more time with you, I real­ize it is/was all part of God’s plan, just like can­cer and the heal­ing of cancer.

You are the one and only man I have ever looked up to in my life and you are my Super Hero Daddy, no one could ever match up to the legacy you left here with us.

You are my favorite and I LOVE YOU SO MUCH DADDY! Thank you for the time we spent together.”

My own mem­o­ries were mak­ing me unchar­i­ta­ble.  A fam­ily has been mor­tally injured.  Chil­dren have lost their father.  A com­mu­nity has lost its center.

I typed his name into Google to see whether there was more infor­ma­tion about how he had died.

On the first page of results a news story from six years ago came up.  It had been pub­lished in an alter­na­tive news­pa­per.  It told the story of an anti-homosexual event that had been orga­nized by the Boy who would become a Pas­tor.  The reporter describes the peo­ple who came to the micro­phone dur­ing the event to repu­di­ate the sins of the unpure.

The Boy who would become a Pas­tor exco­ri­ates the state as  polit­i­cal body that cares so lit­tle about its peo­ple that it would actu­ally pro­vide incen­tives for them to engage in soul-murdering sin.

When the Pas­tor died in that car crash in Uganda, he died with com­plete con­fi­dence in the right­ness of what he had done in his life.  Noth­ing had changed.  He had found another scape­goat, another group that he could focus people’s fear and anger on, and within that fear and anger he could find his own place of power.  He had no com­punc­tion.  His right was his due.  The weak had brought their own pain upon themselves.

What I had wit­nessed was a young boy per­fect­ing the skills that would define him as a grown man.

The words of St. Augus­tine came to mind:

All the per­ver­si­ties of all errors, all sects, preach­ing deviant morals and ungod­li­ness, have had as their authors men of great bril­liance. They weren’t the brain-children of any sort of men, they were started by men of the sharpest intelligence.

I can mourn then, not my own lin­ger­ing injury, not the loss his chil­dren suf­fer, not the early death of an influ­en­tial man.  I can mourn the waste of a pow­er­ful nature, even as I admit it likely never would have changed,  because the Boy who would become a Pas­tor believed he had found redemp­tion, and that in redemp­tion oth­ers would have to be left behind to be punished.