This time I really mean it: Farewell to my journalistic home | Opinion

In 1994, the Dalai Lama visited Berea College. It wasn’t every week His Holiness stopped in Kentucky, so this was news, and as the Lexington Herald-Leader’s staff religion writer I went to cover it.

I was among maybe 20 reporters, photographers and videographers who attended a press conference with the revered holy man.

Here’s the thing I remember. At the conference’s conclusion, as videographers stowed their cameras and I stuffed my reporter’s notebook in my hip pocket, the Nobel Prize laureate quietly made his way around the semicircle we news wretches had formed.

He stepped face-to-face with each of us in turn, looked us in the eye, smiled, bowed slightly and thanked us for coming. I may be imagining this part, but I think he also shook our hands.

I never saw any other famous person do that. It lodged in my brain. Typically, reporters are treated as if their clothes smell slightly sour.

I was moved by this Tibetan Buddhist’s kindness, his awareness of our humanity.

Back at the newsroom, a colleague asked, “So, how does one address the Dalai Lama?”

“Easy,” I replied. “You say, ‘Hello, Dalai.’”

‘This might be the best job in the world’

As I wrote last week, this will be my last column for the Lexington Herald-Leader. Leaving its pages feels like saying a final goodbye to a treasured friend.

My columns will continue to appear monthly on an excellent (and free) website, Religion Unplugged. [LINK: https://religionunplugged.com/ ]

I covered religion for the Herald-Leader as a reporter from 1990 to 1997. During that same time I also wrote weekly opinion columns. After a five-year hiatus, I came back in 2002 as a contributing religion columnist.

I was only star struck once. It was a press conference for the Rev. Billy Graham, who visited Louisville in 1994, the same year as the Dalai Lama’s trip to Berea.

I’m glad Graham didn’t come around afterward to greet journalists personally. I might have swooned to the floor.

When I grew up, rural Kentucky was Baptist to a degree that seems unimaginable today. My parents, grandparents, neighbors and playmates were Baptists. My dad was a Baptist preacher.

Billy Graham was our hero, a fellow Baptist who was the most famous evangelist on the planet. We watched his rallies on TV. Some referred to him half-jokingly as the Baptist pope.

And there I was, in Louisville, 10 feet from the great man in the flesh, asking him questions. I wasn’t a Baptist myself anymore, but I was awed nonetheless.

“I’ve hit the big time,” I thought. “This might be the best job in the world.”

And it kind of was.

The chance to meet people of all faiths

Covering religion has been an education, more beneficial, I think, than a degree from a top-flight seminary.

I learned that my brand of Christians — the born-again, sweat-slinging, sawdust trail brand — weren’t the only kind. We weren’t even the majority.

I became friendly with Roman Catholic nuns and priests. I stayed with the Trappists monks at the Abbey of Gethsemani and sat at Thomas Merton’s desk. I met Unitarians and Mormons and Seventh-Day Adventists.

I spent an afternoon with an itinerant prophet dressed in white, who traveled in a van covered in hand-painted signboards warning of a coming apocalypse. I became pals with a tongues-talking Episcopal priest who’d break out into glossolalia in public, then giggle like a mischievous kid.

I ate with Jews at their temple and hung out with Muslims at their mosque and once even met some Zoroastrians.

Connecting with others through writing

When I resurfaced at the Herald-Leader in 2002 as a contributing columnist, my first wife Renee was slowly dying. I was her caregiver. It was a horrendous period for her, our son, our families, our church and me.

I didn’t get out of the house much. So when it came time to write my columns, that’s what I wrote about — caregiving, suffering, doubt and, after Renee’s death, grief. I wrote about those things not because of any great mission I felt, but because they were all I could think about.

I heard back from people all over Kentucky and all over the country. Thousands of readers. By far, most were fellow caregivers and mourners who wanted to tell me their stories.

I’d stumbled into an ocean of pain that wasn’t on any map, that I hadn’t known existed. It seemed people on every street in America were struggling to make sense of tragedies they could hardly bear and couldn’t talk about candidly.

A woman wrote: “I suffer head and neck pain from trying to wear a brave smile.”

It helped them and me alike to know there were others caught in the same mess, that it was normal to feel lost, mad and scared. It helped to be honest.

If my writing ever made a difference, that was the time.

‘Trying to serve God as best they know how’

I’ve concluded that we humans share a big God who loves variety. He made myriad types of people, and reveals himself differently to different folks.

Nobody believes anything in a vacuum. All pilgrims have their history and their reasons, which make sense to them. If you’ll listen, their reasons begin to make sense to you.

Which is not to imply that all faiths, or all individuals within any faith, are equal. Some religious people are zealots and nut jobs. Some traditions are better than others.

Mainly, however, religious folks are trying to serve God as best they know how. They hope to transcend themselves and their foibles. None of us understands God, or ourselves, entirely. None of us possesses all the answers.

But if your faith helps you love God and love your neighbor, you’ve made a pretty good start in the right direction.

Paul Prather is pastor of Bethesda Church near Mount Sterling. You can email him at pratpd@yahoo.com.

This story was originally published April 29, 2026 at 12:37 PM.