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Adding insult to injury

This time 4 years ago I learned to cut my own hair, with predictable results. This time 4 years ago I was prohibited from going to a barber. Yes, the two statements are connected. I could have just let my hair grow, but it would have annoyed me. As it is, despite the improvement (I think) in my skilfulness, now my haircuts annoy others. Well meaning comments are graciously accepted, and my usual reply is, “Thanks, I did my best.”

I’ve made only one exception to the self haircut - on the happy occasion where I was the Father of the Bride. But apart from that, every haircut in the last 4 years has been all my own work.

It’s become a ritual, if not quite a sacrament. The result is an ‘outward visible sign of an inward bloody-minded determination’, and the process is a contemplative homage to the lives and livelihoods, conventions and core values that were utterly destroyed during ‘the troubles’.

The ritual takes place in the small garden shed I use as a workshop. Surrounded by large power tools and small hand tools, shirtless, staring into a mirror and protected by a locked door, the hair comes off and drifts to the workbench and the floor. Various other grooming niceties take place before I emerge, with stocks of defiance replenished in equal measure with the sadness remembered.

I don’t tend to bring the fight to others, except in the form of wonky haircuts. The fight for accountability, the fight for apology, the fight for truth. But when the fight comes to me, I tend to push back.

I pushed back when a grumpy admissions nurse scolded me for not wearing a mask, and got a reply from the hospital two weeks later confessing all the mask requirements had now been abandoned; I pushed back when I ridiculed the communion wine being presented in an eye-dropper, and in short order we went back to a common cup. I mostly push back when something in the news gets up my nose, like a police chief commissioner complaining that he felt ‘bruised’ having to implement the ridiculous health orders, like filling skate parks with sand and checking inside people’s coffee cups to see if there was any coffee left that justified not wearing a mask.

When the antagonist is not a family member, or a friend, or an acquaintance, pushing back is less risky than when they are. And much harder, requiring more skill, thoughtfulness and, frankly, courage. Likewise, the more subtle the nature of the affront, the more ‘nuanced’ it is, the harder it is to stand firm and not destroy relationships.

In front of me is a proposal to use our church as a ‘pop-up vaccination site’, for ‘flu vaccines. Some see it as a great ‘missional opportunity’. Presumably, the logic goes ‘flu vaccines are safe and effective, we will save lives by loaning our meeting room, and vaccine recipients will recognise that we did them a favour by loaning our meeting room, and then they will make the leap and come to faith, somehow, in a sliding-doors moment that would never have happened without our meeting room.

I’m not convinced. None of the clauses in the logic hold water on their own, let alone in sequence. The flu vaccine doesn’t work, the life saving claim is only supported by conjecture and modelling, there’s no guarantee anyone will even give a passing thought to the generosity of loaning our meeting room, and while I won’t second guess mystery, I remain sceptical of the likelihood of a ‘road to pop-up’ conversion.

I won’t be within a bull’s roar of the pop-up vax clinic, should it go ahead. In that sense, I have no bone to pick with those who might attend it. They can knock themselves out. And I don’t worry that some might not come to faith as a result of attending. That’s above my pay grade. What troubles me is the outward visible sign of the monstrous social disgrace that was inflicted on us all, and some of us more than others, in the recent past. To have a vax clinic inside the very meeting room from which unvaccinated parishioners were excluded during morning teas (we were invited to enjoy morning tea outside, in the carpark) sticks in my craw.

I don’t know quite how to respond to the proposal - perhaps I should just repeat that last sentence, and let the chips fall where they may.