Daughterson

Okay, so I love this song. And it's as close to a blog post as I'm going to right today, certainly, so here you go:




Daughterson

by Joe Stevens
2007

My haircut don't look right
My clothes don't fit just right
Them boy clothes are too big and girl's too tight
My feet they look too small
And I ain't very tall
I fight with my mom every time I go to the mall
If I can't be your daughterson, I ain't nothing at all

The teachers are all thrown
Public school is a war zone
Kids won't leave me or my Queeny brother alone
Don't get picked to be on teams
Though I'm scrappy and I'm lean
Those girls, they seem to look right through me


My body has betrayed me
My life, the sun is setting, black as night
If I had only known about those girls
Yeah, they saw me all right

I'm obviously a man
But I sit down on the can
I get shots in the leg by my lady's helping hand
My scars run across my chest
Dr. Brownstein is the best
And ain't no one can make me wear a dress

Just because I've done this
Doesn't mean you have to do it too
You don't know what it's like now, do you?
Well, some of you do…

Well, you say I'm going to hell
But I've been down that well
And God is a big boy, he can speak for himself
Don't mess with God's design
But where do you draw the line?
How bout Botox, diet pills, face lifts, braces, deforestation, nuclear warfare, Viagra….
Well, I think I'm doin fine

You're so scared of everything
You shout these rules that you invent
Who are you to force me
To believe what you think Jesus meant?

I grew up in a disguise
The pain has made me wise
Oh, my people stand, be seen, and we will rise
My body is my home
I won't ever be alone
And I found my place behind this microphone


I have chose my consequence
I've chosen my name
And I can be your Daughterson
Cause they're one and the same

liturgical year meditation

So, today's Ash Wednesday.

And it feels good.

I just wasn't feeling Epiphany this year. Maybe I wasn't sitting with it long enough, but it was just not resonating for me. All this light imagery, and revealedness, when I've been spending so much time with Holy is the Dark, and God the Unrevealed, God the sneaky one around the corner, just barely visible but beautiful because of it.

So: Epiphany did not feel exactly like that.

And moreover, I'm not feeling the light imagery for other reasons. All this light/dark, good/evil, white/black stuff raises some really problematic questions about race. AND, all this sight/blindness stuff raises some other, perhaps-similarly-problematic questions about ability. So there's that, that gets in the way, appropriately, for me.

So: epiphany, not so much.

And today I told someone that I was glad it was Ash Wednesday, and usually that just means that it's time to enter the mourning/difficult/struggle time. But it feels really good this time. Like: Ash Wednesday means Lent is beginning. And Lent means that Easter is coming.

I'm often reassuring people that they don't have to rush into resurrection, or into Christmas or whatever. That's why they're seasons and not days, I say. And maybe this year I didn't really get much epiphany into me.

But, oh, Easter's coming.

And Sunday, I went to Hurlbut (my home church) for probably the last time with Ted (my longest-running pastor) as pastor. And he moved around the front of the sanctuary as he preached, naming all the spots we have seen Jesus. Jesus in the nativity scene, Jesus in the Christ Candle, Jesus in the cross, all the way through... Jesus in the pews. It was pretty beautiful. Seeing Jesus, running into that guy at all kinds of random places, and if you miss him this year, you know he'll just be waiting there again, when we come around once more.

My mom got me a poster of the liturgical year for Christmas. It's just a big round circle, with lots of different colors on it.

Alright.

-d

ps- A couple of posts ago, somefolks had its two hundredth post. Huzzah.