Tattoos And Tent Revivals

Unlike too many of my peers, I make no apologies for my age. Some years back, I was mildly horrified when I heard a friend say to a group of people, “I’m giving away my age here, but….” His remark struck me as prissy and effeminate. All my life I’ve heard women make remarks like this; though I’ve never understood why, women in my world have long been protective of their chronological age. But men? This statement was foreign and jarring to me. Since then, I’ve heard more and more men make statements like this. Of course, I’ve also seen more and more men primping before mirrors, crying whenever someone sticks a tv camera in their face, and gushing to anyone who will listen about their feelings. I currently work with a young man in his late twenties who lived with his parents until just a few weeks ago and who carries a small tote bag of hair care products around with him. This callow youth likes to refer to me as “the old man” in what I’m sure he thinks is an edgy and cutting manner. He seems somewhat nonplussed that I don’t take offense to his jabs. Like the Chinese, I consider my own silver hair and knotted knuckles to be badges of accomplishment, marks of endurance. I am immune to cracks about my advancing years, especially from a pudgy individual sorely in need of a work ethic infusion and a self-discipline implant. Perhaps he can arrange to have these procedures performed at the spa where he gets his pedicures.

I say all this because I have lately been aware of my persistent ability to be shocked by the values and mores now considered acceptable in public life. No matter how much coarse behavior I witness, I have not yet been rendered numb to it all. Most recently, I was reminded of my awareness of such things when one of our receptionists arrived for work one day this week.

It was a hot day, and this woman — in her mid-thirties and married with three children — strolled in wearing a backless sun dress and sandals. She greeted me as she passed me in the hallway and asked me a question about a work matter. I turned to answer her as she walked on down the hall, and I was treated to the sight of a butterfly the size of a dinner plate crawling up out of her dress and onto her shoulder blade. I stopped and gaped. The phrase “professional work attire” kept going through my brain. She turned to look at me since I had not answered her, and I had to shake off the sense of unreality before I could respond to her question. After the manager arrived, a little kernel of hope within me kept waiting for the woman to be sent home to change…but of course this never happened. I spent the day wondering what our elderly clients must have thought when they caught sight of the technicolor scapula. Perhaps they had tattoos of their own. Perhaps they don’t want to give away their ages.

***

On the drive to work, I pass an office that sits in a lovely little valley. Every year about this time, the field next to the office is the site of an old-fashioned tent revival. A large canvas tent appears, an acre of folding chairs are positioned beneath it, and roadside banners announce the week-long event. From what I’ve been able to observe in my daily passing, turnout for the revival is less than impressive.

The origin of tent revivals in the rural South can be traced back to the days when agrarian communities often had no regular pastor and relied on circuit-riding preachers to periodically visit the far-flung hamlets and hollers, bringing bibles, tracts, educational materials, and Christian books. And of course, the usually week-long events were centered around the open-air preaching of the gospel to all who would come. In the pre-electronic age, the tent revivals were an enormous social event and typically drew the entire community. Some folks who had to travel longer distances to the revival site would camp on the grounds. A festive atmosphere prevailed, except during the preaching and altar calls, when powerful peer pressure would be brought to bear on anyone who hadn’t gotten “saved” in front of the entire gathering. When tents were not available, the revivals would be held beneath the shade of brush arbors, hence the sentimental term “brush arbor meetings.”

As I watch the revival ritual each year, I cannot help but wonder why these people bother. The widely-scattered communities with little access to convenient transportation are gone — the number of people without cars or access to cars is minuscule. The need for a tent or a brush arbor is completely obsolete; almost all church buildings are centrally heated and air-conditioned and lit with bright florescent tubes and packed with comfortable, padded pews or chairs. Why would they come every night to sit fanning themselves in the muggy air, right next to a state highway with its blatting air-horns and noxious exhaust fumes in order to hear a message just like the one they heard last Sunday? Is there some special spiritual cachet attached to listening to a preacher outside? I suspect that the revivals are well-intentioned attempts to recapture something lost long ago. I am melancholy in my belief that the organizers of these tent revivals are wasting their time. I believe these are productions, entirely for show, bearing little to no lasting results. So much of the South is trapped in such spiritual shadow-boxing. The people are highly sentimental and long for something of the vitality of their grandparents, and they hope that putting on the Christian equivalent of a Renaissance Fair will somehow garnish them with spiritual gifts and abilities.

But next Monday, they will drift into their workplaces, and they will not be changed, they will not be more spiritually mature, they will not have new knowledge. They will fall back into the patterns of this age. Many of them will display ample skin and vulgar skin grafitti, jarring visual exhibits that would have barred them from entering a tent revival in the days of their grandparents. And they will not fathom the dissonance of their lives. Most of them would be angered by my seemingly offhand dismissal of their traditions, traditions to which they cling so tenaciously while violating the the spirit of the tenets that gave rise to the events they try so hard to recreate.

When I return to work on Monday, the tent will either be gone or will be in the process of being taken down. The earth there will be a little more beaten-down, but there will be no other sign that a group of mostly-sincere people gathered there nightly for a week, lifting their voices into the hazy mountain air, leaning forward in their uncomfortable chairs to hear the amplified voice of a man they believe to hold the truth. And I will look at the surrounding woods and hills and I will wonder if any of the animals crept to the edge of the treeline during the seven nights, watching and listening and marveling at what the children of Adam were doing beneath that striped dome.

~ S.K. Orr