Monday, March 21, 2011

#226-Putting Dead Birds in Your Hair

First things first: Welcome back housekeeping.


I have notebooks full of posts for this blog right now...e-mails to myself for posts, post-it notes about posts, posts about posts in the draft form in this blog.... Needless to say I have some stuff unleash. But it ain't gonna be pretty...


Things I have written about in these "top secret" posts:

  • The affinity for us to preach against minimum requirements (and the logical delusions of grandeur mixed in with such a sermon)
  • Gnostic Pentecostals (where I use such a word "dualism" and dont repent)
  • Liberals (including but not limited to the ever illusive "Grace-Monger")
And it's that last bullet point that most of my secret posts are about. Except I kind of rail against those who I have in the past allied myself with. I wouldn't say it's me going conservative. I would say it's me going more philosophical and finding some of the liberal position empty (not that the conservative position is by any means more fulfilling but my previous writings on this blog regarding these shortcomings speak for themselves). So i guess I am explaining my silence from this blog not just on business but also because of hesitation of me getting misinterpreted in the process of my liberal polemic. So as I write the following "SAL-Like" post which isn't concerned with theology, i also want to say, be forewarned that you who once loved me, may end up hating me, and i would ask you to enter into conversation with me in the comment section if you disagree in coming weeks. Also the gnostic pentecostal post will be up Wednesday evening. And then my first "anti-liberal" post will be up Friday.

Now back to dead birds:

(you so need this song right about now, i mean look at the lyrics: Almost cut my hair, it happened just the other day. It's getting' kinda long, I coulda said it wasn't in my way. But I didn't and I wonder why, I feel like letting my freak flag fly.)

The Mystery and my assumptions
There is a great mystery to me amongst the female Apostolic gender (well there are many such mysteries, but this post aims at one of the most confounding mysteries of the Apostolic female)....


It regards their hair.

I would imagine the tendency for an Apostolic female's hair to "conceal" the surprising length of their hair...I'm not saying it's right or wrong, but in terms of self-consciousness, I can imagine the internal agony some females of our movement may feel when out amongst our society and noticing the less-intrusive hairstyles of their secular peers because they cut their hair...

Along this same thought you hear of a girl chopping her hair so it will fall off with wooden blocks, but yet she can innocently say she hasn't cut her hair. More popularly one hears of females in our movement perming their hair as if to "fry" the hair off. Now the ethics of this "short-cut" i care not to discuss here, but the point is such attempts at shortening hair would be more along the line at what i would imagine females in our movement would be tempted to do in their flesh.

The Mystery of Drawing Attention to your Hair
However, there are more popular trends (and this is where the mystery comes in) in our movement wherein the female does the opposite of what I would assume the case: The apostolic female brings attention to her hair and thus makes a visual cacophony of her hair as if on her head rested the Queen of England herself and thus the female wanted the whole world to know that such Royal persons rested within her hair. They decorate their hair sometimes with poofs that could house a homeless community or they add a headband bigger and shinier than a Hollywood premier...there is obviously the equally vulgar idea to stick a huge flower in your hair so that if worse comes to worse, a bee will try eating pollen out of your head. In the late 90's, it was hair-sticks, and I'm told that in the 70's some Apostolic Females placed entire oatmeal boxes in their hair (not joking).

But the idea that has appalled me the most of recent trending in regards to Apostolic females and hair is the title of this post: Putting dead birds (or what appear to be dead birds) in your hair-
Now the tendency may be to shout that this trend should be considered ornamentation or the 21st century version of braiding your hair with gold (a-la I Timothy 2:9), but i say nay. I say that what we are seeing here is modesty in it's most sincerely humbling form:

What can be a better display of humility than volunteering to let your hair showcase the remnants of a bird's corpse? There is a reason most of these dead bird hair-pieces are black and thus more akin to a raven than they are white: because they symbolize death and decay.

In summary then, is not the "dead hair piece" trend that is so popular these days at conventions and Bible colleges, not a living testament to the APostolics taking on the suffering and confusion of their world and wearing it on their heads as if to sympathize with such suffering?

Although I can understand the opposite point of view: Taking anything that is smaller than a tree shrub and putting it in your hair. At which point the "dead-bird hair trend" is just simply a very bad joke on all volunteering Apostolic females who wear the garments that look like dead birds thinking it is fashionable. But seriously, who does that?

15 comments:

  1. nobody knows who she is ...but is does....she does....

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  2. yay!! SAL's back! In typical sarcasm and photo-editing-in-Paint no less! lol Thanks for giving us the funny stuff first to brace us before the thought-provoking! :D

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  3. "What can be a better display of humility than volunteering to let your hair showcase the remnants of a bird's corpse?"

    Hahahaha!!! I'd better start looking for that bird that bounced off my windshield....

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  4. "Grace-Monger"? I'm scared! Hope I'll be considered your sister in Christ when this post comes out? I can't detect which way this is going to go from your post.

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  5. Birds about the head do not portend well. See Genesis 40.

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  6. I have found myself recently refusing to go with the trends of Apo hair. It started with "The Bump". I refused to wear a crazy bump on my head, I mostly refused chopsticks (I think I had one pair that I wore twice.) I refuse the flower, enormous headband, or dead birds. There is a girl at my church who often will wear a flower/fluff type deal that adds 5 inches to her height (no lie.) However she's a teenager so I'm willing to let her slide so long as nobody older then her decides it's a good look. *shiver*

    As for the hiding their long hair...I was actually thanking God this week for an unanswered prayer (I didn't sing the song, though.) When I was a child I prayed and prayed and prayed that my hair would grow long. Now that I'm in my 30's and it falls just a couple of inches above my waist, I'm SOO happy that I don't have hair to my knees. It's hard to fix, it's hard to look professional in a business world when all you can do is make an emormous bun or have if falling down to your knees. I've often wondered why God wanted us to have uncut hair when it often isn't very flattering.

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  7. Joel, you are a riot. I so enjoy the readings.

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  8. Um, hard to fix? Hard to look professional? I completely disagree. My hair falls 6 inches short of the floor, is naturally wavy, and very thick, and I get nothing but compliments on it on a regular basis. I rarely wear it down, ponytail, braid, or fully down. Long hair can be made to look very professional. Its a matter of taking the time to learn how to do it.

    Just a comment from the other side...

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  9. Maybe you should give lessons to some people I know =)

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  10. Put a bird on it!

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0XM3vWJmpfo

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  11. If the Bible says its a sin for a woman to cut,trim,shave,shorn or otherwise shorten her hair, Ill eat that dead bird.

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  12. This comment has been removed by the author.

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  13. @Anonymous, I couldn't find any scripture for you, so I guess you are safe from ingesting any dead birds whole.

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  14. hmmm 1 corinthians brother..might wanna grab the salt..and get ready to dig in

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  15. @Anonymous 2 - 1 Corinthians is not about cutting hair, nor does it say that it is a sin to cut hair. People often mangle that passage in an attempt to justify their stance against hair cutting for women, but completely overlook the historical context of the scripture and the fact that both men and women would take nazarite vows, which often resulting in shaving of their heads (Paul did this). I could spend time breaking it down here, but I wrote an article on it a while back.

    http://www.aaronmatthew.com/blog/?page_id=425

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