What I Look Like
I'll give you a hint: it ain't my profile pic.
Peace, beloveds. Poet Jesus here. I’m delighted to meet a regular throng of new subscribers this week! I invite you all to pull up a patch of hillside as I distribute delicious loaves and fishes aka poems.
So my Substack profile pic—the DaVinci portrait with a pen photoshopped in—makes me and my scribe Tania giggle, and we have no intention of changing it. But. As you probably well know, I’m not a white, long-haired, blue-eyed Malibu surfer. I’m me: a first-century Galilean Jew with very likely short hair and, gasp, a short tunic as well. Add a long jacket, and Cake would be pleased.
Of course, how you see me, and what that means for your heart, is important. I’ll let the poem speak now. Take care, friends, and love one another. Your enemies, too.
That British medical artist got pretty close: Dusky skin, roadkill hair. Black eyes plucked from the void they hovered over. I was cragged and compact, a Galilean arrowhead. Forget about sun-warmed chestnuts spilling over robed shoulders: I scuttled around in an undyed tunic— hello, knees!—tallit fringes sucking up dust. My grimy sinews lurched to the rhythms of hammers and planes. All this to say, I’ve still got a soft spot for Caravaggio. He wanted so badly for me to be beautiful. Even when I’m getting flagellated, my cheeks exude a rose-petal glow. I’m also partial to the portrait you scrawled with crayons in 1981. I’m balanced on a peak, stick arms outstretched, a dozen burnt umber fish suspended in the clouds. Stray-cat disciples gather at my feet: a rainbow wreckage of circles and triangles, a few whiskers squiggling to the sky. I can tell that they love me. I can tell that they are listening. This is what I look like now. —Thank you to Relief Journal, on whose blog this poem first appeared.
I’m so with this unbeautiful Jesus you got going here (after Isaiah 53)…, whom you portray beautifully as having a heart for Caravaggio despite C’s need to “beautify” the unbeautiful. Why can’t we work instead at representing the so-called unbeautiful beautifully and so unmask our deep cultural bias against any idea of beauty that diverges from the Greco-Roman ideal? This is the bias currently underlying the new administration’s aim to limit the design of new federal buildings to the “classical” ideal. It is also what grounds the chief executive’s determination to surround himself with only the “loveliest” of people. How possibly have a heart for him despite all that is loathsome about his character? Lord, have mercy.
Isaiah 53:3