One summer when I was working at Camp Epworth -- a United Methodist Camp in High Falls, New York -- my friend Jimbo cut his hair. He'd also been a long-haired kind of guy, but he came back to camp one evening having gotten himself a rather conservative cut. He declared that no one would ever make a more drastic change than he had.
I took the dare.
To be fair, I made my decision scientifically. I polled the rest of the staff, asking if I should cut off all of my hair. The results were, numerically, pretty evenly split, but the enthusiasm was all on the shearing side. And so, with a couple of those arts and crafts safety scissors and a bag of disposable razors, I went bald. And I actually kind of enjoyed it. And thus began my literal on-again, off-again relationship with my hair.
I've tended toward keeping it long -- and my wife particularly likes it when I've got a MacGyver-esque mullet -- but I've been shorn, too. When I went before the Ministerial Fellowship Committee I was asked if my long hair was some kind of statement and if I'd be willing to cut it more conservatively if long locks got in the way of my ministry. In fact, just a few short months later I asked my Internship Committee whether they thought my appearance was hindering my effectiveness. To a person they said that they didn't personally have any problem with how I looked but that they thought there might be people in the congregation who did. I cut my hair.
It was very short when I came to the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Church, although I was sporting a pretty big beard at the time. In the last couple of years I'd started letting my hair grow out again. But a couple of months ago I cut everything back. I buzzed my hair and shaved off my beard (something I hadn't done in over twenty years). You can imagine that folks here had all sorts of reactions.
During the month of July -- which I'd taken off for a combination of vacation and study leave -- I've allowed my hair to grow back some. I have a goatee now, which my wife had said she'd never want but which she allows looks good on me. And now that I'm back at church, people are having all sorts of other reactions.
Recently I had several people on the same day say essentially the same thing -- "this looks more like you." Yesterday, my friend and colleague the Rev. Tony Perrino delivered a wonderful sermon about being "nobody but yourself." And that got me to thinking about people's reactions to my appearance. Isn't it interesting that the way we look can get so wrapped up in people's thinking with what they think of us?
I was going to write, ". . . with how they see us" and realized that that's a big part of it. We do judge books by their covers or, at least, we connect with those covers. (I recently bought a new edition of that Herman Hesse classic Narcissus and Goldmund and was disappointed that the cover art had changed from the one I'd had as a kid.) And how easy it is to go from judging a book, in part at least, by its cover and prejudging something (or someone) by its appearance.
Nothing profound today. Just some musings.
Pax tecum,
RevWik
"Oh say, can you see my eyes? If you can, then my hair's too short!"
