HAIR for Lent

HAIR is a rock musical about hippies that features nudity, drug abuse, the mocking of traditional values (even the sacrament of Communion) and the celebration of alternative lifestyles. Last year I saw a live performance of Hair during Lent, the Christian season of fasting and repentance before Easter... and it couldn't have been more appropriate.

I confess that I did not stand with the audience during the final applause (although The Lady did). The performance was fantastic and filled with energy, but it was a little much for this son of a small-town Kansas banker. I'm not exactly part of the "establishment" - my wife is Jewish, my children are black, we're practically broke, and we attend a church filled with some of the most eccentric people in suburbia. But I am reflexively conservative, and I wasn't ready to embrace what I had just seen.

However, the more I thought about what I had seen, the more I liked it. I came to realize that Hair is the perfect musical to see during Lent.

The hippies were obviously wrong about a lot of things, and in some ways our society is still paying the price for their excesses. But they were seeking the right things, even if they looked in the wrong places. They recognized that something had gone wrong with America, and that all the traditional sources of authority weren't offering any genuine answers.

Jesus repeatedly emphasized that those who appeared farthest from God were sometimes the most likely to "get it," whereas those who seemed the most religious were often very far from the living God. The truth is, once you become a hippie you are halfway to becoming a Christian. Which many of them ultimately did: it has been estimated that as many as 250,000 of their generation, many of them former hippies, were part of the Jesus Movement of the early 70s (the closest thing to a revival the USA has seen in the last century).

Hair ends with the song "Let the Sunshine In," which repeats the refrain,

Let the sun shine!
Let the sun shine!
Let the sunshine in!

Having heard it before, I did not realize that it is a tragic expression - particularly in the stage version - and not a celebratory one. SPOILER ALERT - One of the main characters has been killed in Vietnam. Around his casket, they are begging and pleading for light and peace. The curtain closes, and despite the cast bowing and the wild applauding afterward, the audience is left wondering what hope is left. The musical is subtitled, "Let the revolution begin," but the revolution appears to have failed.

At Easter Vigil, as I walked forward to receive Communion, the worship team was singing, "Alleluia He Is Coming." It's a great song but something about it did sound slightly dated. I looked at the copyright date: 1974. It was written by a middle-aged Southern woman in an Anglican church, five years before HAIR, but in one sense it is far more radical, for it celebrates a revolution which has never died.

I looked up, and I saw my Lord a-coming

Alleluia! He is coming!
Alleluia! He is here!
Alleluia! He is alive!

I looked up, and I saw the 30-foot icon of the resurrected Christ that was painted just a year before - his features Middle-Eastern, the wounds visible on his hands and side, radiating glory. There were flowers sprouting out of the cross, which to a 1st-century Roman general would probably look as silly as putting a daisy in the barrel of an M-16 rifle.

My mind went back to the final scene of Hair, of desperate men and women looking for genuine hope. And I thought, the sun IS shining!