Something I’ve always enjoyed about stories, in literature, movies, or wherever, is the distinction between the primary characters in the story and the stock characters that are thrown in to keep the plot rolling. Although they are usually a passing feature and emerge from the background for just a moment, I have a soft spot for the entirely one-dimensional characters of a story who arrive for just a moment and provide a clear and predictable function in the scene.

One of the earliest characters like this I can remember was from an after-school cartoon. I won’t try to give every detail but hopefully paint a small picture of what happened. One of the characters had lost someone she was close to. There wasn’t a body left behind and, for cartoon reasons, no possibility for a funeral. All she had to remember him by was a bandage he had worn. Not knowing how to grieve and having little forum to do so, she begins to wander through a cemetery. Far from helping, seeing other people remembered and memorialized brings even more pain.

Cue the black robe and white collar. As a young Mennonite, I didn’t connect the dots of what was being represented. It took me a while to realize that this wasn’t a undertaker or cemetery custodian of some sort. But over the next few minutes of the show, healing occurred. Tears stopped and mourning began. In the midst of the frequent violence and explosions of children’s cartoons, this was something completely different. I still haven’t seen monsters or needed a Power Ranger, but I did know what pain was and this priest seemed to be able to kick it square in the butt. I was hooked.

But he was gone. This nameless, faceless black robe moved along and kept on going through the cemetery, probably off to the next adventure and innocent person to rescue. The rest of the show was quickly less interesting.

As time has gone on and there has been opportunity to reflect, I’ve realized that the life of a priest has many occasions to be a stock character in another person’s story. In many of the major events of somebody else’s life, the priest is nowhere near the forefront but at the same time, the event isn’t happening without him there. Half the time a priest won’t have a history with what is going on. He’ll drop in, bring Christ to the situation, and then be gone as soon as he arrived. While far from every interaction a priest has with the world around him goes this way, a good portion do. It’s a stock character interaction and the priest is more of a role than a person. A collar and call are what is needed, face or personality not so much.

I’m not trying to comment on if this is a good or bad way of things. Far from it. I’m just trying to get my head around the idea of being a function as frequently as a person. I like stock characters. They are predictable to do their thing. Just like the professor is always absent-minded and the redshirt is killed to signal danger, the priest will always give the sacrament, show love, and say the prayers. Being a faceless priest in somebody else’s story doesn’t exactly get me thrilled, but it is helping me think about what it means to have a lifestyle given to service. It seemed to work out well for the nameless cleric on the weekday afternoon cartoon.

It could just be that this is a sign for me to watch more cartoons.