“There are some things one can only believe singing,” author Lauren Winner told our small writing group. We were gathered in a large, sunny room at Laity Lodge, perched above the prettiest spot on the Rio Frio River in the Texas Hill Country.
As a worship leader, I found that the idea took root with me as I turned the phrase over in my mind. Winner moved on to the next matter, work-shopping another essay, but I was struck.
The phrase came to me again last month when my friend, artist Scott Erickson, told me about his Lenten-theme project for the congregation we serve, Ecclesia Church in Houston. He had designed a series of 10 tattoos representing the 14 traditional Stations of the Cross, and was asking volunteers to tattoo them to their bodies, as a way of observing the 40 days leading up to Good Friday.
Ecclesia is not a typical church: Not only do we have an “artist-in-residence,” the aforementioned Scott Erickson, but about half the congregation is already tattooed, says pastor Chris Seay. This year, instead of the annual Lenten art show, the inked congregants would become the Stations of the Cross, and stand in the gallery spaces where paintings or photographs would normally appear.
I didn’t have a tattoo when I joined Ecclesia’s staff. I grew up in a Jewish home, albeit a nonreligious one, and my brother often reminded me that if I had a tattoo, I couldn’t be buried in a Jewish cemetery. I wasn’t very Jewish in life, so I’m not sure what made me think I would suddenly become Jewish in death, but nonetheless I shuddered every time we drove past Mt. Hebron Cemetery in Queens. New York’s largest Jewish cemetery, it’s an endless sea of headstones, jutting out of the landscape like broken teeth. I don’t know if my brother was accurate or if he was simply trying to prevent me from, say, inking the name of my favorite band (Jane’s Addiction) or boyfriend (Ben) on my body, but whatever his reasoning, it worked.
Not until I became a Christian in my mid-20s did I reconsider a tattoo. I learned that many Christians see the command of Leviticus 19:28 (“do not put tattoo marks on yourselves”) in light of Christ’s new covenant with the church, and put the forbidding of tattoos in the same category as keeping a kosher diet or stoning adulterers. Even still, I’d been a Christian for a decade before I finally got one. On Fat Tuesday of 2011, I got a tiny tattoo of three small words taken from my favorite poem: the thing itself. The tattoo reminds me what I came to this faith-life for: not for social acceptance or theology, not for ritual or small groups or women’s retreats or a place to play my music, but for God, and God alone—for God himself.
In the early 1990s, archaeologists in southern France discovered a series of Paleolithic cave drawings. The oldest, the Chauvet Cave drawings, date back some 35,000 years. Many believe that tribesmen hurled spears and arrows at the drawings in a kind of pre-hunt religious theater, knowing that to have a successful hunt, they would first need to visualize it, to believe in it. In Cave of Forgotten Dreams, a 2010 documentary about Chauvet, a scientist confesses the unexpected impact the “Cave of Lions” had on him. “I decided not to go back,” he explains, “because it was an emotional shock. Every night I was dreaming of lions.”
Ecclesia’s Erickson and Seay came up with the idea of tattooing the Stations of the Cross as a way of visualizing the suffering of Christ, and even entering into it (tattoos come with a little bit of pain), before celebrating the Easter Resurrection. Tattoos are one way of marking the journey of Christ—”Jesus Accepts His Cross,” “Jesus Meets His Mother,” “Jesus Is Laid in the Tomb”—on our arms, legs, torsos, and backs as a way of believing in these events and their power. Just like Winner said of singing, there are some things one can only believe tattooed on skin.
I remember the first time I saw my friend Sloan’s grandmother’s Auschwitz identification number on her forearm. It was Sloan’s 12th birthday party, a pool party, and her grandmother sat under an umbrella at a picnic table. Her short- sleeved blouse revealed five numbers stamped on her flesh in faded blue ink. At the time I was reading on repeat The Diary of Anne Frank, becoming obsessed with the Holocaust and my own questionable Judaism. But nothing, not then or now, has ever made the horrors of the Holocaust more real to me than seeing those five numbers. Something inside me wanted to shout—to call a halt to the game of Marco Polo, to the grilling of hot dogs, to fingers wrinkling too long in the water, and demand we recognize, at this backyard barbeque in suburban New Jersey, that the numbers on Sloan’s grandmother’s arm were telling a story. I can’t count how many times over the past 25 years I’ve dreamt about those numbers.
Our bodies tell our stories, whether we like it or not; as mothers and daughters, as wives and sisters and friends. As followers of Christ, our bodies should also tell his story. Not only to remind ourselves that because of that Good Friday the impossible is now possible, but also as a witness to the world around them. Some of the tattoos my friends got at Lent have found their way into my dreams. This Lenten season, as I go about the business of life, these images remind me that the Stations of the Cross tell a story of impossible cruelty, of innocence slaughtered. But they also foreshadow the greater story—that all that cruelty will be turned on its head Easter morning, that love is more permanent than death.
Cameron Dezen Hammon is a worship pastor and songwriter who lives in Houston, Texas, with her husband, daughter, and cat named Steve. She has written for Her.meneutics about miscarriage, and blogs at HipsterChristianHousewife.blogspot.com.
All photos Paula Hammon.
