UNTOUCHABLES [T, 5-12-26]

CHRIST IN WINTER: The Irrelevant Ramblings of An Old Man—UNTOUCHABLES [T, 5-12-26]

 

It was our soph or junior year in high school. As I approached a group of boys in the hallway, Louis Simpson looked up and said, quite good-naturedly, “We’ve got to stop telling dirty jokes now; John’s here.”

I don’t think they were actually telling dirty jokes. It was just a way of acknowledging me as an untouchable, someone who didn’t belong in the real world.

Of course, the very fact that to this day I think they were not telling dirty jokes may tell you why I was an untouchable. Untouchables are naive. That’s part of how we are set aside from the real world.

Some real-world people try to take advantage of untouchables, use our naiveite against us. But—if you’re lucky, as I’ve always been—folks protect you, because they know you need it 

I remember seeing movies and TV shows called “The Untouchables,” about America in the 1920s, when politics and the economy were much as they are now, when enough bribe money can get you anything, regardless of the law. Enter Eliot Ness and his special police, called unofficially “The Untouchables,” because they could not be bought or bribed.

I guess I was that sort of untouchable, in a minor way, except no one ever tried to bribe me, anyway. No, I wasn’t an Eliot Ness sort of untouchable. I was not pure of heart, like Ness. I didn’t even need to be pure of heart. I was untouchable because people protected me. I was in a tiny niche of society that not only did not get its hands dirty but that didn’t even know how to get dirty hands.

I am part of the 2%. Not the way that is usually used, the 2% that has all the money and power, and abhors the rest of us as untouchable because we are, compared to them, poor and powerless.

No, I’m in that 2% that has always, without knowing it, led a charmed life. Because others protected us from the real world.

That does not mean, of course, that we two-percenters have no bad days. I’ve had cancer. People I love have had cancer. Good friends have suffered, and died too soon. I’ve had to be a comfort in tragedy when the tragedy was so bad that comfort wasn’t even possible; that’s hard.

Friend Kathy Roberts says that she has a face that says, “Tell me weird things.” I think I have a face that says, “Don’t tell me bad things.”

Now, again, that isn’t literally true. Indeed, my profession was listening to people tell me bad things. But it was bad things about themselves. it wasn’t bad things that involved me. I was just a listener, not a participant.

That distance, though, was one of the traits that made me a fairly good pastor. In that sense, I was a Ness type of untouchable. Since folks knew I wasn’t going to get lost in the jungle with them, I might be able to show them a way out.

Sometimes I feel a conflicted about being an untouchable. I didn’t like being excluded from that group of laughing boys, the ones telling the dirty jokes. But I feel grateful that they protected me. Being an untouchable has made my life so easy. I hope you are an untouchable, too.

John Robert McFarland

“Old age is like everything else. To make a success of it, you’ve got to start young.” Fred Astaire, via The Writer’s Almanack.