Ten Commandments and the Bearded Lady

The Louisiana law requiring the posting of the ten commandments in school classrooms has put me in mind of my own experience of religion as a child.

In the late 1940s and early ‘50s when I was very little, my father was rector of the Episcopal church in a town called Alma in central Michigan. In the summer because my mother was a proto-hippie, I was allowed to wander the streets as a largely untended barefoot urchin – an incredible blessing in retrospect and no harm done.

Apparently one day I found myself on the midway of a county fair or exposition of some kind, and I wandered into the tent of the bearded lady. There was a hubbub, and I was being angrily shooed out the door – I was frightened -- when the lady herself came down from her stage. I do remember that.

She interceded to protect me.

I’m sure I don’t really remember her face, but I carry in my heart a general impression of beauty and kindness -- a wonderfully full face painted in reds, blues and purples framed by radiant blond hair and a long soft beard that brushed my cheek when she stooped to tousle my hair.

At some point later, perhaps by a few years, the teacher in Sunday School class at my father’s church propped a large framed portrait on his knees of a sensuously handsome young Swedish man in a shimmering white robe with flowing blond tresses and beard. When asked if we knew who it was, I threw up my hand eagerly and said it was the bearded lady.

Everyone was alarmed, and there was an inquiry.

My greater religious Waterloo, however, was the commandments. The entire first day was given over to what my Sunday School teacher must have believed was the most important element in all the commandments, the one thing never to get wrong -- the word, ass. It means donkey. I left church that morning thinking that if my neighbor had a donkey, I was going to be so jealous I might die.

What remained a mystery longest, almost to adolescence, was the one word no one ever explained or even mentioned to us.  I distinctly do remember that for a very long time I thought the stricture against adultery was a commandment forbidding us to become adults, which made all the sense in the world to me. Adults were bulbous giants with hair growing out of their noses who were always angry. Eventually I did work out that adultery was the way people had sex.

My father, who is no longer with us, was revered as a caring and effective shepherd of his flock. Sadly when the clerical collar came off, he was less effective, a bit stiff in fact, in addressing awkward topics with his own children. At some point rather than have the talk with me, he handed me a biology textbook with illustrations that might as well have been maps of Bolivia.

My father was a New Yorker-reading, mid-century, middle western, middle class, Roosevelt liberal intellectual who would be seen today as having very little in common with the Maga fundamentalists posting up the ten commandments in school rooms. But I think there may have been at least one small link.

Their connection is the belief that a printed text, a biology textbook or a list of rules handed over or displayed like a shamanistic object, is a good way to get out of talking to children. In my experience looking back that far, I think it just leaves the kid to make it up as he goes along.  

 And by the way, to this day when I see one of those portraits of Jesus as the gorgeous young Swedish man, a tiny place pings in my heart -- a small light of affection and gratitude for the bearded lady.