Lessons from Elder Lurch, Robert Kirby’s Missionary Dog
Posted on Dec 27, 2013 by Trevor in Religion
In a recent speech recorded by Dialogue, Salt Lake Tribune humor columnist Robert Kirby gave a hilarious and thought-provoking exploration of his career and experiences mixing humor and culture. One anecdote I especially loved was about a dog he kept as a pet during his mission in the mid-70s in Uruguay. I’ve transcribed the segment below, which takes place from 51:28 to 56:21 in the audio recording.
I was not, as you probably understand by now, a “good” missionary. I wasn’t really cut out for a mission environment. But the last six months in my mission was really the golden time for me because the mission president finally understood that hey, if we leave Elder Kirby alone, he’ll actually obey the rules. So he sent me to this little town where it was just me and this new companion from the states. And we would knock on doors and people would call us names and throw things at us and slam the doors in our faces.
I had a dog at the time, a really big dog. We weren’t supposed to have pets, but I had one.
[backtracking] And I understood why people treated us like this, because we would knock on their doors, ask them if they were interested in us, and if they weren’t, we weren’t interested in them, and we left, and that was the only contact they had with Mormons until the next set of missionaries came along and did the exact same thing. So to them, we were just these tall, rich, blonde North American kids who’d come down to bother them about Jesus, and they just considered us a nuisance. One of the first things you do when you’re trying to dismiss somebody is reduce them to just one thing. When you can reduce them to, “Aw, it’s just the Mormons again,” it’s that much easier to dismiss them. And when you can dismiss them, the next step is, hey, you can abuse them, too.
One day, I was bored at not having anybody to talk to, so I put a pair of gym shorts on my dog. His name was Lurch, and I put a white shirt and a necktie on him and a name tag. And he looked fabulous. And I told my companion, I said, “Come on, we’re going to work.”
And he was mortified. He said, “You’re not really gonna take the dog outside dressed up like that, are you?”
And I said, “Why not?”
And he said something I never forgot. He said, “What if the mission president sees us?”
And I said, “The mission president? God’s watching us right now. What the hell you worried about the mission president for? Didn’t you know lightning could come inside?”
And we went to work, and it was great. We’d knock on the doors. (Actually, it was just me and Lurch. My companion wouldn’t do it. He’d wait on the corner.) We’d knock on the door, and people would come to it, and they’d fling the door open, and you could read their minds. I mean, they’d just stand there. And you could watch them think, almost like the words were going across on their forehead. “Oh, the Mormons are here, dammit. There’s two bikes, and there’s two Morm… One of them’s a dog…” And they knew something wasn’t right, but they didn’t want to look stupid by pointing it out, and so they’d wait for me to explain. And I never did. I could talk to them as long as I wanted. We’d get down to the end of the street and there’d be all these heads stuck out of doors [wondering], “What is that?”
Now, we did that for a couple of weeks. We eventually stopped doing it because my companion starting running out of white shirts. It turns out there’s a reason why dogs don’t wear them.
And we never converted anybody because of Lurch, but something else really cool happened, and that was that after about a week, people stopped calling us names, and they stopped throwing things at us. And when they heard we were in the neighborhood, they would actually come out and talk to us, because we had stopped being that stereotypical thing they thought we were. And suddenly now, yeah, we might be insane, but at least now, we’re interesting. And most the time, that’s the best you can hope for.
[facetiously serious tone for dramatic effect] And this dog thing taught me a valuable thing about the priesthood. It’s true.
Because when the assistants to the president found out we were doing it, they actually got in the only mission car we had, drove all the way out to San José, burst into our apartment, and said, “You gotta stop doing this thing with the dog, ‘cuz you’re giving people the wrong idea about the church, and it says in the missionary handbook you’re not supposed to have pets. So you have to get rid of that dog.”
And I said, “Or what?”
And they didn’t have an “or what”. So they left, and I kept the dog. And there’s the true power of the priesthood. “Or what.”
