I was in the 4th grade at St. Mary School, Greensburg, IN. My dad was a great one to help us to read and find new words. I came home with a word that I thought, for sure, he hadn’t heard. I heard it on the playground. I thought it had just been invented. The word was “clodhopper.”
We were always home for the noon meal. We lived in town. We were not like the kids who came to school in buggies. I envied those kids in a way. They didn’t have to run home. They could just pull a sandwich out of a sack and reach for the ball and bat.
After the prayer, Mom said, “Dad, your son has a new word. He told me about it already.”
“Oh, good,” Dad said, “What is it?”
Oh, I was ready. I knew he’d get a big kick out of it. “Clodhopper!” I said it, loud, and I doubled up with the comedy of the sound. “Clodhopper.”
Dad wasn’t as excited as I expected, though. He took it calmly. “Oh. What does that mean, my boy?” I wasn’t ready for a quizzing. I just liked the clopping sound of the word. It made every country boy sound like a joke. I was stumped.
Dad had a question. He was always keeping me off balance with his questions. “Who’s the smartest one in your grade?”
“I think Rosie Eder. She knows her arithmetic, and she’s always helping kids with spelling and stuff.”
“Really? She lives out on the road to Batesville, doesn’t she? Is she a Clodhopper?”
“Well, yes, I guess.”
“Who’s the best baseball player in the whole school? I think you told me once.”
“Dick McAuliffe. He’s a pitcher, and he’s the best batter, too.”
“Really? Does he come to school in a buggy?”
“Well, yes.”
“You know, my boy. You told me Rosie Eder is the smartest girl in your grade and Dick McAuliffe is the best baseball player in the whole school. I think each one of them are what you’d call a Clodhopper. Clodhoppers must be pretty OK, do you think?”
I ate my soup, just thinking. That’s the way my Dad made me think. He’d catch me in a corner and then see how good I was in learning the way out. Learning is what he was after. “Know what you are saying.”
Lately, in our day there are specific words used in an evil way to put down people whom we’ve not met yet. I guess I hear those words because I am a priest and people think that I’ll agree with them, without thinking.
The words are “pagan” and “heathen” and “savage.” They are like tags to put on road-kill. The tags say, “You might really be a thing of beauty, but now you’re tagged. You’re garbage.” That kind of talk is dreadful to me, because I’ve learned from my Dad to listen and to examine things and to get to know things, before I talk.
Pagan. From Latin. It’s a tag some folks have used for a long time, and now, with more world travel, it’s back in vogue. Look it up. It means “someone who lives outside the city on the pagus, the prairie.” It’s a way to put someone down.
Heathen. (Old English) There is a lot of heath-land in Britain. Heathen is a ready word for city dwellers to use when they want to have fun at the expense of folks just down the road.
Savage. (French) Those who live in forested places. Like northern Minnesota?
A vacationer’s delight.
There’s another word that only the righteous can rightly be heir to. Look it up. The word is infidel. Unfaithful, untrue to one’s calling, debauched, delinquent; it’s what we admit to when we prepare for Confession.
Consider them, in your humbleness consider those people called pagans. You might find something rare and beautiful in them.
Jesus did.