Genitalia.
Yes, that's right.
Chiefly, what irks me about genitalia is the representation of them in graffiti. I mean, have you seen any lately on your local walls?
Some good graffiti. Take heed.
It's rudimentary to say the least. Rude and rudimentary (which is also the title of Jane Austen's unfinished novel). I worry because the state of art on walls leads me to one of the following conclusions:
1. Graffiti artists have forgotten what their bits look like. Fair enough. You're under pressure in a passageway that already smells of wee, so you can be forgiven just doodling the (ahem) bare essentials. There's no time to check how close to the subject your art is.
2. Graffiti artists are in fact all impressionists. These are Dali-esque representations of naughty bits. Or somebody in their (ahem) blue period. Fair enough.
3. Graffiti artists are actually producing uncannily accurate sketches. This is actually what their down-belows look like. In which case, maybe see a doctor?
Anyway. Point is, please stop drawing your nethers in public places, or I'll start marking them out of 10 for artistic impression. We don't need the bits that people broadly agree are best kept undercover drawn on walls. They're called privates for a reason. Put your pens away, people. Get thee to Channel 4 if you must.
Where was I? Oh. Yes. I disapprove of public shows of badly-remembered members.
And it may be that some of you out there disapprove of me blogging about it. This is where the blog title comes in: Gentility and Genitalia (which is also a lost novel from Jane Austen).
During my last sermon at St Andrew's, I was highlighting the virtues of being as common as muck, on the basis that God was pleased to become common as the mud he used to form humankind in the beginning. I was briefly mentioning how my mum occasionally looks at me disapprovingly and says, "A vicar wouldn't do that." Every time, I answer, "Well, a vicar just did." The example I had in mind was once when I absent-mindedly scratched my bum in public. And as I told my lovely congregation about this, I was unsurprised to see, among the people delighted that we were talking about real things at long last, a few faces that looked a bit like smacked bottoms themselves. These would be people who, given the choice between gentility and genitalia, would go for gentility any day. Genteel souls.
That's fine. No pressure. But genteel is more or less the opposite direction to the one taken by God when he came on down to earth to be a mewling, screaming, puking, smiling baby that filled its swaddling clothes repeatedly for the first months of life. God is anti-genteel. He's got no airs, no graces, no blinking standards at all from what I can see. Heavens, he even works with, on and sometimes even through me. What the heck is that?
The church gathers top its petticoats and wrinkles its nose at the muckier things of this world at its own peril. We need to take a leaf out of God's book, and not be clothing the savage as our ancestors in mission did when they came across bare breasts in African villages, but instead refusing to be shocked, squatting in the mess with people and talking about the real stuff. How it hurts. Who we are. Living up steps (as one of my lovely ladies describes it) is exactly what God didn't do, doesn't do, and will never do.
A more socially utile example of graffitum.
Polite, yes. Reasonable, yes. Reverent, yes, whatever that means. But not starched or starchy, not prurient, not so heavenly-minded we're of no earthly use. Songs of Praise needs more rude bits, if you ask me. We're made of earth, and we shouldn't be afraid of the earthy. Most of us are only here because of some (imho) unpleasantly squelchy meeting of two people that may well have involved genitalia. It may not need shouting from the rooftops. It probably doesn't need drawing on walls or graphically depicting on television. But this is the world we're called to love, so I'll keep on laughing every time I see some badly-rendered bits in Blackley's passages. This is the world God wants to save, not some pretend-polite-prurient place. And it has some rude bits in it.
Genitalia? In their place, perhaps.
Gentility? No, never.
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