Author's Commentary: My Turn As Pope

Alright, let's get a bit silly today and discuss my whimsical, horror-adjacent story, "My Turn As Pope," which was published by Silly Goose Press in their recent Issue 7. You can read it HERE.

First, one thing to know about me is that I grew up Catholic and attended Catholic school from K-12. This choice was made for me by my parents, not because we were particularly religious, but because the schools were better than the public options. I share this to say that Catholicism, and everything that comes from being part of that religion for so long, is very interesting to me. I use religion in a lot of my stories because of it.

I also, and I never thought I would find myself here, work for a nonprofit associated with the Catholic faith. I, like many of the people working in the engineering department, am what you would consider a lapsed Catholic. That is to say, I was brought up in the faith and received the sacraments, but no longer practice due to differences of opinion on a number of social issues.

Anyway, it always felt inevitable that I would write about Catholicism in some way. Then, last summer, we got a new Pope. Because of where I work, there was a lot of attention put on this. I am also always a bit curious about the process. It's very interesting to me.

So, it was only natural that my subconscious started playing with an idea involving the Pope.

The first thing I thought of was how funny it would be if the search for the Pope could go as wide as any job search. But then I thought, well, for any other job search there are qualifications they're looking for. You, for instance, would not be interviewed for my day job unless you had at least a decade of cybersecurity experience, a handful of specialized certifications, and probably a master's degree.

So, then, what is funnier than a normal job search for one of the most powerful positions in the world? One where literally anyone could be selected for the job. Because I am a clown, I took that one step further and asked: what if every living person got a shot at the gig?

Being somewhat practical, I ran some numbers and realized that couldn't reasonably work unless the time in the role was exceptionally short. Even then, the average lifespan has something like two billion seconds, and over eight billion people live on the planet. How would that be managed?

I work in tech and have an MBA, which forces you to learn all about the math of operations and logistics management, so I decided a global network of people working for a new Silicon Valley version of the Vatican made the most sense.

Of course, the next logical consideration I had was what the heck can you even accomplish with a position of power for one second? Would you even prepare for it knowing you only have a 25% chance of getting picked and your tenure would be shorter than the time it took me to think about the inner workings of such a thing?

That's when the idea of a cosmic-horror Shark Tank came to me. Your time as Pope is only one second on the corporeal plane, but it could be hours on a soundstage in heaven. This idea continued to develop into pitching a panel of angels instead of God directly. It also played with the idea that a pitch you see on Shark Tank may only be on your screen for a few minutes, while the reality is that the people there spent hours pitching and going over details, with all of that work simplified into a few minutes of TV.

I don't know how I ended up on nut allergies as the pitch, probably all of my kids' friends who are afflicted, but I wanted it to be personal to the protagonist. I also wanted something deadly enough that there would be doubt in the end. Just because you get to pitch God an idea doesn't mean he is going to approve it, or that the next Pope isn't going to pitch a better idea that undoes what you proposed. And that's why I ended the story the way I did.

All in, even though this one was whimsical and fun, it did help me explore a lot of feelings about my faith and the issues I've had with it over the decades. You know my famous saying: when in doubt, clown out!

I've never said that before now, I swear.

I hope this little bit of rambling about my story was entertaining. If you haven't read it, I would be chuffed if you gave it a try. If you have read it already, maybe check it out again with a little bit of this author commentary in mind.

As always, thank you for trusting me with your time, and thank you for reading my words.