Bruce Springsteen and Barbershops

Sometimes words alone aren't enough.

Exploring this theme of penitence, I wanted to find some way of giving outward expression to what I've been feeling. 

The Bible has three main forms of expressing penitence. The first is wearing sackcloth and ashes. Maybe if I'd been walking in May or June that could have been an option, but in February I'm sticking to Gore-tex and lots of layers. The second is fasting. Again, on a pilgrimage which should see me averaging around twenty miles a day for nearly a month, foregoing a cooked breakfast and a hearty dinner would seem to be setting myself up for failure. And then there's shaving your head.

I'm going to the barber's in an hour or so.

Over the past couple of weeks I've been reflecting on the connection between penitence and shaving your head. What follows is not a scholarly treatise on the practice but simply how I feel about it at this moment in time.

Firstly, there is some sense of humiliation, of self-humbling. In truth, I'm not feeling all that worried about my hair going; that's been happening for years! In fact, I'm curious to see how I'll look. What I'm not looking forward to is it gradually re-growing; how odd I'll look as I go through various stages of skinheadedness. I'm worried about what strangers will think of me when they see me for the first time. There's an anticipatory sense of embarrassment about how people will look at me at the end of a day's walking, when I walk into a bar or hotel and take my hat off. I don't think I'm going to enjoy that at all; certainly not to begin with.

Stuart, 18 - by Rosemary Holmes

Secondly, there's something about becoming strange to ourselves. I've got no idea how I'm going to be looking by lunchtime. There's a great line in Bruce Springsteen's 'Streets of Philadelphia', where he sings, 'I was bruised and battered, I didn't know how I felt, I was unrecognizable to myself. Saw my reflection in a window and didn't know my own face...' That resonates with part of how I feel about doing this. Have you ever done something you shouldn't have done, something you're ashamed of, and found yourself saying something like, "I don't know what came over me. I've never done anything like that before. That's just not me." Sometimes our failures make us unrecognizable to ourselves. Having my head shaved is a making manifest of that feeling. But it's also about going through that experience of self-estrangement so that you might come to know yourself again, know yourself more truly.

Yesterday, I was having coffee with a friend who suggested a third dimension to this ritual. In some traditions having your head shaved is about stepping away from the past and making a new beginning. There's something very beautiful in that idea. When my friend shared that with me, I found myself thinking again of that same Springsteen song, which combines that sense of new beginning with the idea of pilgrimage, of journey.

'I walked a thousand miles just to slip this skin.'