Police Raids of Divine Love
Mar. 20th, 2004 01:18 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
quislibetI'd been putting off getting a haircut because the closest and least expensive place to do so is also the slowest. They do an excellent job at that barber shop (which seems to have a dual mission of providing perfect haircuts and saving souls), but I have seen men with hair shorter than an eighth of an inch sit down in one of those chairs and undergo half-hour haircuts. I guess length just doesn't matter.
When I got there this morning just after 10, it was rather crowded, and a Dominican man who, apart from skin tone, bore a freakish resemblance to an old roommate of mine moved to make room. A CD of songs praising the Lord in English and Spanish at a high volume made conversation difficult, but the Dominican man and a black man on the other side of me talked anyway. Their discussion ranged widely, touching on the awesome power of God, sermons they had recently heard or given (including a much expanded and updated version of the tale of Zacchaeus, the tree-climbing tax-collector; we all have to be like the sycamore tree, and lift people up so they can see Jesus), racial prejudice (and whether "black" or "African-American" was a more appropriate descriptor; I have above used the term preferred by the man referred to), race-motivated violence on Hispaniola in the middle of the twentieth century, and marriage (mixed-race [for], gay [against, I think, but it wasn't clear], and otherwise). Discussion of marriage turned into a reading by one of the barbers of that 1 Corinthians bit on love that always gets read at weddings, which was received with hallelujahs.
(Meanwhile there was also a toddler awaiting his haircut; his punk-compatible mother asked him to speculate about what creatures they would be seeing at the Aquarium. These did not, the lad discovered in the course of conversation, include monkeys or kitties.)
In the face of all of this, it was hard to concentrate on the article I had brought about representations of Cleopatra in the Augustan period, despite containing quotations like "slut-slave of despair."
It was just after noon (!) before I finally got my turn at a haircut. This was after I had been briefly but enthusiastically proselytized with a reading of John 3:16, and after I had heard the most striking metaphor for the cleansing power of religion I have ever heard, which was roughly as follows:
"Jesus," one of the barbers had said to his waiting friends and customers, "comes into you like a, like a SWAT team, taking out all that sin and all the bad stuff inside you, bam, bam, bam! You need to surrender yourself, you need to say to the Lord, 'Jesus, come raid me, Lord, come raid me now.' Would a drug dealer ask the police to come raid them? Of course he wouldn't. But that's what you gotta do...."
When I got there this morning just after 10, it was rather crowded, and a Dominican man who, apart from skin tone, bore a freakish resemblance to an old roommate of mine moved to make room. A CD of songs praising the Lord in English and Spanish at a high volume made conversation difficult, but the Dominican man and a black man on the other side of me talked anyway. Their discussion ranged widely, touching on the awesome power of God, sermons they had recently heard or given (including a much expanded and updated version of the tale of Zacchaeus, the tree-climbing tax-collector; we all have to be like the sycamore tree, and lift people up so they can see Jesus), racial prejudice (and whether "black" or "African-American" was a more appropriate descriptor; I have above used the term preferred by the man referred to), race-motivated violence on Hispaniola in the middle of the twentieth century, and marriage (mixed-race [for], gay [against, I think, but it wasn't clear], and otherwise). Discussion of marriage turned into a reading by one of the barbers of that 1 Corinthians bit on love that always gets read at weddings, which was received with hallelujahs.
(Meanwhile there was also a toddler awaiting his haircut; his punk-compatible mother asked him to speculate about what creatures they would be seeing at the Aquarium. These did not, the lad discovered in the course of conversation, include monkeys or kitties.)
In the face of all of this, it was hard to concentrate on the article I had brought about representations of Cleopatra in the Augustan period, despite containing quotations like "slut-slave of despair."
It was just after noon (!) before I finally got my turn at a haircut. This was after I had been briefly but enthusiastically proselytized with a reading of John 3:16, and after I had heard the most striking metaphor for the cleansing power of religion I have ever heard, which was roughly as follows:
"Jesus," one of the barbers had said to his waiting friends and customers, "comes into you like a, like a SWAT team, taking out all that sin and all the bad stuff inside you, bam, bam, bam! You need to surrender yourself, you need to say to the Lord, 'Jesus, come raid me, Lord, come raid me now.' Would a drug dealer ask the police to come raid them? Of course he wouldn't. But that's what you gotta do...."
