Refresh and Gladden My Spirit
Refresh and Gladden my Spirit: 15 August 2023
Emma wanted to go shopping. I do not like shopping. It presents multiple challenges. From my father I consumed a Scots penny-pinching thriftiness and from my mother a fear of being flashy or inappropriate. Clothes shopping adds a generous dollop of body image issues along with a pinch of fashion cynicism. The combination can suck all the pleasure out of a shopping experience. But Emma loves shopping, and I didn’t want to ruin my time with her.
Emma said she wanted shorts, but what she really wanted were bike shorts. I tried to be both encouraging and realistic: “I’m so glad you’re working out! You can’t wear these to school.” As I rehung discarded clothes I casually ventured into topics such as trends, marketing, boundaries, labels, expense, and of course, bodies.
I remember being her age and trying really hard to look like a Dallas Cowboys cheerleader. Impossible. Scanty clothing aside, I do not have the right body. My body is much more suited for the 1580s than the 1980s, when beauty was big boobs, no butt. Even now, with the pendulum swung toward the bass, I can’t shed my early indoctrination in what is desirable, what is too much, what is beautiful.
I can tell you what it wasn’t. It was not Sinead O’Connor.
When she burst on the music scene I'd never seen or heard anything like her. She was only two years my senior, and her life embodies so many of the reckonings we Gen Xers continue to face. If I’m honest, I didn’t pay too much attention to her. I liked her music and still have the secondhand CD I bought for $8 at Papa Jazz. But I didn’t follow her closely. I didn’t buy other albums; I didn’t go to concerts.
In this era of social media and oversharing and paparazzi, it is easy to feed a curiosity of someone’s actions, behavior, back story. We could learn right away that O’Connor was abused as a child by her mother, sent as a teenager to a Magdalene Asylum, escaped that to pursue music, and never received any therapy. "There was no therapy when I was growing up so the reason I got into music was therapy. It was such a shock for me to become a pop star, it's not what I wanted. I just wanted to scream." Music gave her a platform to sing her truth, call others to fight the injustices of the world, scream her pain.
I came of age in a world screaming mostly for excess. McMansions. Big hair: think Dynasty, Heavy Metal Bands, Janet Jackson. The Mall of America. The Berlin wall fell and the residents of East Berlin celebrated with their first Big Macs. Rappers draped themselves in gold. Madonna.
Sinead O’Connor was the opposite. Stripped down bare vocals. Black and white photography. And of course, her shaved head. She shaved it in response to her record label wanting her to grow her hair long and wear miniskirts. She didn’t want to be commodified; didn’t want a man to tell her what to do or who she could be. Radical.
I wish I’d paid more attention. Her issues were all of my issues. Body image. Self-expression. A commitment to social justice. A deep faith often at odds with the prevailing practices of faith.
I knew she tore up the Pope’s picture on Saturday Night Live, but I wasn’t outraged—the Pope wasn’t my image of God or church—and it was played off as a stunt instead of the true protest gesture that it was. Hell, I didn’t even know what protesting was at that point in my very sheltered life.
I wish she’d made it clearer that the protest was to stun the world into taking notice of the child abuse the Catholic church in Ireland and throughout the world covered up and successfully ignored for decades. But I also wish people had listened to her when she did explain it. She was so much more than that scandal.
She struggled with mental illness. She had strained friendships and family relations. She was fiery and outspoken and cantankerous. She was no saint. No more than I am. No more than you are.
But she was a prophet. And she was treated as prophets are: deliberately misunderstood; mocked; booed; gaslighted; and, well before the word term was coined—she was cancelled.
In today’s Daily Meditation from Richard Rohr, he writes that prophets are radical traditionalists—radical believers in God and radical lovers of God’s people. He writes, “The prophetic gift or ‘charism’ is rare, I believe, because it demands two seemingly opposite things—radical traditionalism and shocking iconoclasm at the same time.”
Iconoclasm: the belief in the importance of the destruction of icons and other images for religious or political reasons. I can’t think of a better description of Sinead’s scandalous act of tearing up a picture of the Pope on Saturday Night Live. Not just any picture. The one of the Pope John Paul II on his visit to Ireland in 1979 when he said, "Young people of Ireland, I love you". The one she could see hanging behind her mother while she was being abused and molested.
She was booed. She was mocked. She was also right to speak up. She kept speaking. She kept protesting. Above all, she kept singing. She used her gifts to prod us and our reluctant institutions to be what we claim to be.
She continued to call out the Catholic Church even while claiming that Christianity kept her alive and able to overcome her child abuse. She was ordained a priest in the Independent Catholic church; some would call that heresy. She later converted to Islam; some would call that heresy. Some may assert these as proof of inconsistency, of cherry-picking, of unreliability. I see it as proof of a deep attachment to God, a lifelong struggle to live outwardly what is primal within, to follow the Holy Spirit where the Spirit blows.
Sinead O’Connor died on July 26, 2023. May Light perpetual shine upon her.
*****
Emma wore new clothes to school today and looked radiant. On the drive to his school, Jack and I listened to an interview with Rainn Wilson, the actor who played Dwight on The Office. He was discussing his book, Soul Boom: Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution. I can’t wait to read it. In the interview he talks about growing up in a Baha’i family, and how that tradition has shaped him and his calling to foster a revolution of hope and joy.
I first encountered the Baháʼí Faith when I lived in Columbia, around the same time I bought that secondhand CD. I came to appreciate its tenets and its followers. A brief overview from Wikipedia: “The Baha’i Faith stresses the unity of all people as its core teaching and explicitly rejects notions of racism, sexism, and nationalism. At the heart of Baháʼí teachings is the goal of a unified world order that ensures the prosperity of all nations, races, creeds, and classes.”
I think Sinead would have agreed.
I offer this Baha’i prayer in her honor, and as encouragement for all of God’s disciples. It’s attributed to 'Abdu’l-Bahá, the son of the prophet. I have loved this prayer since my friend, Tod Ewing, first prayed it with me many years ago.
O God! Refresh and gladden my spirit. Purify my heart. Illumine my powers. I lay all my affairs in Thy hand. Thou art my Guide and my Refuge. I will no longer be sorrowful and grieved; I will be a happy and joyful being. O God! I will no longer be full of anxiety, nor will I let trouble harass me. I will not dwell on the unpleasant things of life.
O God! Thou art more friend to me than I am to myself. I dedicate myself to Thee, O Lord.
May it be so.
