Jesus don't want me for a sunbeam
On linen ponchos (first in a series)
I tried writing about this Vasolines song before, but I unpublished that long ago. Was a mistake trying when I still cared about maintaining face. Well. I’m just a soul whose intentions are good. Lord, please don’t let me be misunderstood.
It’s easy to read this song as a simple contrarian song rebelling rather simplistically against what was then the mainstream cultural Christianity.
Jesus don't want me for a sunbeam 'Cause sunbeams are not made like me And don't expect me to cry For all the reasons you had to die Don't ever ask your love of me Don't expect me to lie Don't expect me to cry Don't expect me to die for thee
And maybe that’s all it is. Maybe that’s all it meant to its writers. Maybe that’s all it meant to the band members of Nirvana, who made the song famous. (I just read on Wikipedia that the songwriter of the Vasolines was able to buy a house only because of royalties secondary to being covered by them.)
Or maybe not. I don’t know and I’m not going to look it up. If you do, please don’t bother me about it, because I don’t really care. This is what I’ve got, and this is how I write, so, let all who have ears etc.
Sunbeams are not made like me.
On my desk I have a little plush Squishmallow cow who has three horns. In the factory, he got a single ear on one side, and an accidental supernumerary horn on the other. He’s a mutant, which is why I put him on my desk. I think we all relate to this cow sometimes. If this cow does nothing for you emotionally, or if you want to lecture me about how only pozzed and bluepilled badgirl wojak characters buy Squishmallows, and that instead I should be striving to be a based tradwife bringing my husband meals while wearing a sundress, this is your clue that the author-audience mismatch may be occurring again, but this time it’s your turn to hide your face and delete.
don't expect me to cry for all the reasons you had to die
This sounds quite harsh and blasphemous. But let me counter: perhaps this exasperation is not directly aimed at the Lord, but at the piteous and theatrical appeals of His various representatives. The Lord after all told us to wash our faces and put on a brave face when fasting. It’s the reps who want to demand these performances of an outward nature.
I went to this parish once where the cadre of alpha church ladies had determined that on Holy Saturday, one must wear a black scarf, as one must have done all through Lent. And then at the moment when the priests change vestments and some other, more useful church ladies are dashing around changing the cloths under the icons and such, one must theatrically flip a white scarf out of one’s handbag and do the switcheroo as well.
After the first time witnessing this spectacle, I wore egg yolk and sunshine through the entirety of Lent. I have my reasons.
Listen, sadsack, at noon on Holy Friday 2022, He is risen. Every bit as much as a couple days later. I get the need for ritual, fasting, sackcloth and ashes style repentance. But give me a break.
Don't ever ask your love of me
This is worded in an intriguingly cryptic way. Not asking for my love, but asking your love, from me. What does this mean?
I can only tell you another familiar feeling: standing in church feeling not like I am being upheld in walking a difficult and narrow path, but that I am being beset with impossible demands. I can only give my own imperfection back. I cannot give God His own perfection. And it wears me down being constantly asked. At some point it drives me to the full Morrissey:
But Jesus made me, so Jesus save me…what can make good all the bad that’s been done?
I simply don’t get people who sneer at the central problem of the Reformation, which was scrupulosity, which is partly a mental tic hardwired into certain people’s brains, and partly a natural and expected design flaw inherent in any legally oriented religious system. I don’t comprehend people who don’t regularly find themselves as the November-spawned monster, turning to the Lord in helplessness. “Be perfect!” the reading cries out perkily. With an implied uWu emoji. Yeah right. I’m not perfect. I can’t be perfect. So I guess it’s up to You now. There’s only so much I can do with this frame of useless limbs.
Don't expect me to lie
This is where the linen ponchos come in.
Another time, at another parish, or maybe it was the same parish, or actually it was an imaginary parish, no, it was a real one, but no one YOU know- the alpha church lady cadre decided that one must wear linen ponchos.
Now at this parish, it was not the custom for women to cover their hair. Very few women did so. So this was not an affectation of modesty, some kind of extension of the headscarf into some kind of neo-byzantine burqa. Neither were they made of warm material like other ponchos. They were worn also in warm weather and did not appear to add any insulation. No. This was just…fashion? Liturgical fashion? Maybe it was meant to evoke- now hang on, this just dawned on me! I think it was meant as a kind of female vestments. A phelonion. For girls.
Now at this point in my life, it never occurred to me that I should have to wear a poncho just because the head honchos were wearing ponchos. I just found it curious. Like- I started to think I had missed some up and coming fashion trend, so I watched the ads that popped up, peered in store windows, trying to figure out where the heck they were even buying these ponchos. Because they didn’t really seem to be trendy. So that wasn’t it.
As these things do, however, it picked up speed and hit critical mass. Now it was kind of the uniform of the parish for women to wear a lightweight upscale poncho, and if you didn’t you were starting to stand out. That’s when it really started to grate on my nerves. Because the poncho is a lie.
The poncho is a lie. A performance meant to show that one is part of the better and more knowing cohort. A performance of piety- not like THOSE girls who wear scarves, but still drapey and flowing. No one was going to wear the liturgical ponchos to work, or school, or to buy a new perch for the parakeet at PetSmart. One wears a liturgical poncho to liturgy, to show that one is a feminine paragon of who knows what.
I realized when the ponchos started getting to me that while I’d come a long way, I had more work to do in the following department:
Don’t dress up as someone else for liturgy. And don’t copy other people who are dressing up as some character because they think they have to. Don’t think they are doing church lady right, and you are doing it wrong. Dress nicely, dress in a way that isn’t going to cause obvious and foreseeable problems. But no character roles.
Everything is outward, everything is a performance, for instagram, for a blog, for marking your belonging to whatever tribe, these days. Everything boiled down to a roleplaying game alignment. Are you Sundress Stacey or are you whatever the badguy female wojak is called? Are you BASED or a TERF or a LIBFEM or CHAOTIC BLACKPILLED? CHOOSE OR ELSE. And so it’s more difficult than it sounds to actually just come as you are.
Don't expect me to die for thee
See I don’t think this is talking to Jesus. Maybe a mirage fake jesus, but not the real one. This is more about like, this whole idea many of us get when we join a church and someone tells us, breathlessly, to read Orthodoxy and the Religion of the Future, and now we have to throw out everything that ever brought us joy, peace, or consolation, because some guy somewhere can connect it back to something evil, and it’s contaminated. Like the guy on here who told me we are supposed to evolve out of listening to music, even classical music. “Evolve.”
Oh dang there’s that scrupulosity bug again.
I’ve seen things and people who like them strongly condemned on the most flimsy grounds, in this department. It’s “dark” or “morbid” (unlike the psalms and the holy week liturgy) it’s “corporate” (is this Punk Planet now?) it’s “too alternative” (so now we’re GenCorp?) whatever. I had a church lady freak out about an innocent cartoon drawing of a flying bird on a kid’s shirt once because “it’s alternative iconography” (now we’re Muslim??)
No, I won’t die for this. This is not the true grail.
We already have the Cup of a Carpenter- why do we keep making these shoddy things out of cardboard and plastic rhinestones?
Well that’s all the time we have for today. Join me again some other time where we will talk about another song. Or not.