Brethren, sorry for the poor-quality cell phone photo of what was a kick-@## rock festival’s stage. I was there yesterday. I got sunburned, and my neck is a little sore from all the head-bopping I was doing.

Here’s the scripture upon which I am basing my homily this week — I consider it a promise to all believers who will pounce on it:

Bless the LORD, O my soul: and all that is within me, bless his holy name. Bless the LORD, O my soul, and forget not all his benefits: Who forgiveth all thine iniquities; who healeth all thy diseases; Who redeemeth thy life from destruction; who crowneth thee with lovingkindness and tender mercies; Who satisfieth thy mouth with good things; so that thy youth is renewed like the eagle’s. — Psalm 103:1-4

Saturday this past weekend, Coney Island was host to a day-long indie rock festival, the Siren Festival, and everyone from other parts of town who considers himself or herself hip, the same ones who go to hear bands in basements on the Lower East Side, seemed to be there.

Most of them were in their twenties, and those who were “older” were in their thirties, and I’m, well — ahem — perpetually thirty-nine at this point, but I was there, too. Does that make me hip? Let’s check:

TOP TEN REASONS I MIGHT BE REALLY HIP

1. Last year, a (Holy) hip-hop CD was released, The Cornerstone, and I was the only white person whose voice was on it — www.newlewmusic.com (Everyone there was half my age, too, it seemed like).
2. I have occasionally been asked for my autograph after readings by hip-looking people in their twenties. I also have gotten a couple of fan letters for my poetry from people who are serious hipsters.
3. There’s a guy in Brooklyn named Jackie, who is an older man of color who volunteers to talk to young black men in “at risk” programs to give them reasons and ways to avoid the mean streets. When Jackie wants to reach these young men across generational lines, he reads them several of my poems that show empowering images of black men. A lit journal that writes about literature of interest to African-Americans gave a positive review of my work.
4. I have watched a cocophonous orchestra in Manhattan — experimental modern music — blare dissonant horns as a woman with a British accent shouted words I wrote about freedom — that happened at Merkin Concert Hall in 2004.
5. I taught a college semester last year where I told my students (truthfully) that I was about their parents’ age, and they said they couldn’t believe me. When I asked why, they told me things like, “My mom doesn’t text her friends like you do.” “You just don’t look that age.” “You dress way cooler than they do.” “You know words they don’t.”
6. I am part of the Colbert Nation — actually, that might make me a total geek in some people’s eyes.
7. I often give readings on stages where legends of the rock world have stood before me.
8. I am so riding the crest of the wave of the return of big earrings.
9. I own clothes by certain hip labels, such as Baby Phat — remember, the Bible tells us that the liberal soul shall be made phat! (Proverbs 11:25, King James Version, Anne Babson spelling)
10. I bought fair trade products long before everyone else consciously started to do so in order to be “hip.”

Understand that there are plenty of things that might disqualify me from hipsterdom — my faith, for one. I don’t have any nose piercings, no tattoos, nor will I get any, when I wear t-shirts, which I rarely do, they may have ironic slogans on them, but they are never cynical, I never do any drugs, designer or other, and while I am always looking for friends, none of those friendships will ever include benefits.

Understand also that when I say “hip,” I really don’t mean Sex in the City chic. Carrie Bradshaw might slum at the events where hipsters go from time to time, but unless Samantha is there professionally to promote them, she wouldn’t be caught dead in the outfits hipsters wear. She would be bored by their artistic and intellectual pretensions. She would not find their antiestablishmentarianism even slightly compelling.

You see, quintessential New York hipsters don’t wear designer labels. I have occasionally joked that I have the K-Mart Jacqueline Smith Collection version of Carrie Bradshaw’s wardrobe, but that’s not really true. Even if I had billions of dollars, I would never buy from the more fashionable couturiers because of their lack of fair trade practices (see my hipster top ten list). I am more chic than the twenty-something tribe that haunts the corner of Stanton and Rivington on the Lower East Side or any corner these days in Williamsburg, but I’m enough like them that I find myself bumping into them again and again.

Most people my age that I know don’t go to indie rock festivals any more — and I promise, I’ll talk about this one part of the scene, I swear — they go to the occasional movie, go to work, go home, feed kids, water plants, once in a while have brunch — their only potential crossing coordinates with hipsters — and attend establishment cultural events. I asked a few of them to go to the Siren festival with me, but they said no. Only my friend Doris, who is twenty-four, said yes, even though she has a kid she could go home and feed. She left the baby with relatives.

Now the festival itself was wonderful. I particularly LOVED this band I had never heard before, and so did Spin.com — they are called Ra Ra Riot, and they are a marriage between the sound of The Clash and The Kronos Quartet. They call their music “chamber pop.” They are a bunch of fresh-faced kids from Syracuse New York — okay, fresh-faced with really, really intense “I’m making awesome music” grimaces. It’s very original stuff.

Ra Ra Riot (totally go to www.rarariot.com because they rock) was on the main stage, set up by the historic roller coaster the Cyclone, so while they were riffing, the only screams were not from fans but from people sliding down wooden tracks very, very fast. The hipsters looked, well, bored.

At the top of the page is the one lame photo I was able to take. The hipsters are bored. So I borrowed another photo from Ra Ra Riot’s promotional material which is more fun to look at:

As a part-time, non-card-carrying hipster, I had forgotten, as my friend Andrea reminded me today, that one of the cardinal rules for being hip is that you’re not supposed to appear to interested in anything, even stuff you spent a lot of time and energy to go see.

Me, though, I was bopping my head and dancing around. If I like something, I just like it. I’m not going to pretend to be ironically detached from it. That’s just lame, that’s missing the point. Honestly, the young, bored people around me were wasting their time, in my opinion, if they weren’t going to even bother to enjoy what they took the F Train all the way to the end of the line to come see.

This brings me to the passage that I quoted — let me focus on that rather mysterious part about our youth being renewed “like the eagle’s.”

Cosmetics promise us this, but surely not in quite the way God meant it. I don’t think here that God is talking about literal age. I think he’s talking about an outlook that brings joy and a freshness of being, physically, perhaps, but because one’s mouth is involved, and good things in it, I have to assume he means something spiritual and intellectual.

One of the things that I find frustrating about talking to people my own age these days is that many of them have stopped entertaining new ideas. It seems with each passing year there is less and less originality among my chronological peers. I did not go to the siren Festival to be “hip,” in fact. I went because I wanted to see it for my own enjoyment. I do a lot of things — like when I learned about “bars” and “hooks” in rap, and the difference between gangsta rap and more mainstream rap from a hip-hop producer’s standpoint, that was just for my own edification and enjoyment.

My peers used to be curious about new things. What happened? I admit wholeheartedly that someone with a child has a lot less time to focus on cultural phenomena. I understand that. But still, wouldn’t being around that child engender greater curiosity by constant contact with someone who can’t seem to stop asking “why?”

And as for those youngster hipsters — isn’t youth supposed to include the ability to just let loose and enjoy without fetters? If being hip means being detached, I’d rather be a geek.

Perhaps being renewed in one’s youth like the eagle’s in Christ is like being held aloft in a state of perpetual vivacity, to be like the Nobel Prize winner whom I met who decided in his late nineties to learn the minutia of artificial intelligence design at the software engineer level, just because it’s cool, or to be like a woman I met years ago in a night club who was in her seventies and in the VIP lounge past the velvet rope, clubbing with her granddaughter because she wanted to see it all. I guess I’m on my way to being like that.

I exhort you, in the name of Jesus, bless the LORD, forget not all His benefits, and remember that if your mouth is filled with His good things, your youth can be renewed. Never stop asking impertinent questions. Never stop trying new things. His mercies are new every morning. Amen.

Brethren, those of you who have been following my blog must have discerned that I am going through a rough period of my life. I just got divorced after the man I loved literally went crazy — off his needed medication, and became menacing. I’m old enough that I thought by now I would have the white picket fence American dream — you know, the Norman Rockwell painting of Thanksgiving with patriarch at head of table, the children, the lovely home. When I was married, I lived in a suburban, lovely home. I now live on Coney Island, back in bohemia, writing my poetry in a (very nice part of the) ghetto. Have you seen the movie He Got Game? Spike Lee filmed that in my neighborhood. As a white woman, as a woman with a job that pays above poverty level, I’m in the minority here.

For those white (or otherwise Rockwell-cliched) people reading this entry, there is an expression that is used in the ghetto — one that I like but that I fear — “ghetto superstar.” The ghetto superstar is the person who plays ball better than half the people in the NBA but who never gets through enough school for the scouts to notice him, it is the singer at the local church who is better than Mary J. Blige but never gets the recording contract. Jefferson’s ideal of a meritocracy is belied by the very existence of ghettoes — don’t believe for a minute that the race is always to the swiftest in our society, not yet. There are people who are known locally in any ghetto for their talents, but the system, and sometimes their own personal weaknesses — drugs, general unreliability, shut them out from real success. I never want to be a ghetto superstar, not in poetry, not in any field.

So here is the scripture on which I am hanging this homily:

Hebrews 12:1 — “ Wherefore seeing we also are compassed about with so great a cloud of witnesses, let us lay aside every weight, and the sin which doth so easily beset us, and let us run with patience the race that is set before us…”

This passage of Hebrews comes right after the “faith superstar” chapter — we get the list of people in the Old testament who hung on to faith despite adversity — then it says “wherefore.” Think “therefore,” “since they did all of this and are watching us.”

A few weeks ago, I gave a reading in Manhattan with a brilliant collection of women for WSQ, the premiere academic women’s studies journal. I was VERY honored to be included in their current issue. I was included with some other poets, among whom is a woman whose name sounded vaguely familiar to me, but when I saw her face, I knew exactly who she was.

Here is her beautiful face:

Nicole Cooley and I met in high school during a summer writing workshop at Bennington College in Vermont. She changed my life. I had never met anyone who was my age and took writing as seriously as she did. I was a little punk rocker at the time, at least the suburban version of one, and everything was ironic. I was not so much an artist as a misunderstood teenager with a variety of radical fashion statements and a real interest in poetry.

Nicole had already finished the manuscript of a novel. She was brilliant, intense, quiet, conservative. I was much the woman in the previous blog entry, dancing with bare-chested men painted green. Nicole’s choices were much more conservative than mine. My poetry was wild and loose. Hers was tight and clean. This is still true.

Today, Nicole has many things I wish I had, at least things that I wish I had my own version of — she is happily married to a like-minded man. She has kids. She is the new chair of a new writing program at a local college. She wholly deserves this distinction at her comparatively young age because she remains as she has always been — a phenomenal talent. She has published novels, poetry collections, and her latest book, soon to be published by Louisiana State University Press, entitled (I believe) Resurrection, is going to be the definitive book on the recovery of New Orleans (where Nicole is from originally) from Hurricane Katrina. I have heard one of the poems from this collection, and it is a brilliant work of art, one that borrows cues from Walt Whitman and Pablo Neruda alike. In short, Nicole is amazing and deserves absolutely every wonderful thing she has.

Have you ever been to your high school reunion and met someone who you used to hang out with, and you find she is still as pretty as she was on graduation day, rich now, with kids on the honor roll? Have you ever then looked at your own double chin in the mirror, reflected on your own bank account, reflected on your own kids, in trouble with the vice principal’s office again?

Oddly, or so I thought it was, I met Nicole in such a way and yet felt not the slightest bit jealous. Really! I mean it! Stop looking at me that way! It’s true. I am genuinely happy for Nicole. Praise God for what He has done in her life. I could not have met her at a time of greater self-doubt than where I am now, and yet I looked at her with everything she’s got, despite all my sweat and travail that I don’t have, and yet I felt blessed, profoundly blessed, that Nicole is not a ghetto superstar — she’s in the NBA, she’s got the Motown contract — and I’m okay, glad, thrilled.

Because God never misses a moment to show me he likes irony as much as I did as a punk rock teenager, here is one of my poems I read that evening in Manhattan, which appeared originally (I am obliged to say legally, as they have first North American serial rights to it) in Red Rock Review:

SONG OF ENVY by Anne Babson

The God of the triple-process blonde is in a heaven where black is never worn, where cream cheese is eaten by triple-process blonde angels, just like in that commercial. The God of the triple-process blonde is in heaven, and there are songs of praise to be sung in a Texas two-step lilt, and there are blonde babies to be pig-tailed and pressed into new dresses. It is Sunday, and the God of the triple-process blonde hovers in a heaven filled with snowflakes over the church converted from the bowling alley, while the triple-process blonde sings songs.

This is a song of envy. This is a song sung in absinthe-green nail polish in an empty night club where crushed cigarette butts line the morning floor, the stench of beer wafting from the broken boards. This is a song of envy. This is a song sung in the bitterness of tea without sugar drunk hungover. This is a song of envy to the triple-process blonde who voted to close this place down last election.

This, Blondie, is my confession — think of it as a prayer before bedtime — even though it is Sunday seven a. m. my head has not touched pillow since high noon Saturday — well, his front seat headrest tilted down wasn’t a pillow, and we weren’t sleeping. This, Blondie, is my confession, my confession to you — your church doesn’t abide Latin or popery (unless you spell it pot pourri), but my confession is this — mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa – I stink of sweaty cowboy, sweaty nightclub, and Sweaty longneck beer, of sweaty sin, of sweaty desperation. This is my battle hymn, a song of envy.

This is a song of envy. This is a song sung in absinthe-green nail polish chipping in my metal bathtub, in frothy water drawn to scrape the glitter off my tattooed back, the stink of cigarettes and “Yeah, baby!” From my single-process head of spiked-up devil-red hair. You — Triple-process: that’s bleach, bleach and Bleach again — you are the object. You are the object of this song of envy.

My God is a jealous God, Blondie. He is a loner. He sulks often. He is enigmatic. He’s like any one of my dates this year — promising to call, but never dialing my number again. Even the answers He provides are in the form of a question, just like on Jeopardy — “What is children going hungry?” “Who is an underachiever?” “What is surviving bitter pestilence?” “What is war, what is it good for?” The holy book I read is filled with more riddle than rhyme, Blondie, and I’ve dog-eared the pages looking For where I get your pristine life, where I stop flirting with losers, where the deus is ex machina, where.

This is a song of envy. This is an epistle from my church — a bathtub for baptism, a beat-up pick-up truck For the lectern, two pair of jeans stiff with paint and cow patties crossed to form crucifix — to your church — The one in the old bowling alley, still boxed-in coffin-like with faux wood paneling, the one where I see Only whitest whites, the one where everyone flosses daily, the one where your God answers everything Before it is asked and whose voice is as clear as the voice-over selling cream cheese, the God of my envy.

Don’t think, Blondie, that my skepticism is chosen. I know a world where you have never walked. I have seen the blisters on my mother’s hands. I have seen my father’s nakedness uncovered. I have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord. He has trampled on the vineyards where the grapes of Wrath are stored — that would be in my uncle’s gun rack, where my cousin picked the lock and exploded his brains on the Naugahyde sofa set. Yes, Blondie, I have smelled burned brains and vinyl, so point me to your Jesus who heals this. I dare him to clean the ring from my bathtub, the scum from my veins.

This is a song of envy, a battle hymn to battle Him. I envy your shingled roof. I envy your fresh-baked Lingonberry pie. I envy your porcelain skin. I envy your pressed dress. I envy your diamond-heavy hand. I envy you your cream cheese heaven and your interceding savior. I envy your ignorance of people like me, who have stared into eternity downward and see their own mascara-murky faces staring back at Them from Darwin’s pond, who see the darkness of “In the beginning” — before your God moved over The face of the Earth, before anyone saw that it was good, before I saw anything but envy.

I mean for this poem to be an exhortation to the Body of Christ who would evangelize women like the speaker, a woman like so many non-believers, who has made choices that were the best she knew how to make, and who feels condemnation from church folks who seem to have it better than she does. We need to tread compassionately with such people, for they are more like us than they let on at first, and they are hungry for blessing and love.

Reading the poem that I wrote years ago on the evening of my brief reunion with Nicole Cooley, however, legitimate superstar, made me test my own spirit for signs of envy. The truth is — I told you to stop looking at me like that — I’m not. So why not?

I cite the passage from Hebrews I quoted earlier for the reason. I don’t know how much or in what Nicole believes, but I do know what I believe. The race that is set before ME is different than the race set before another, and the prize is not a book contract, although, Jesus, that’s one of the desires of my heart. The prize is not family. The prize is not even brilliance. I’m competing in a much more important prize. I’m running the race of faith. I have a stadium filled with onlookers — Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Rahab, Hannah, and the rest. Praise God, and to Him be the glory, I have set aside the weights — divorce, childlessness, every brick in nearby housing projects, disappointments, getting older — and the sin that does so easily beset us — covetousness comes to mind here, and I truly don’t covet, just continue to hope for my own — and I am running the race that is set before ME with PATIENCE, just like Paul told me to.

Trust me. I’m not that holy. I didn’t make my heart any special way here out of my own volition. I’m surprised I’m not jealous. It’s not my own goodness at work. That’s why you can stop looking at me doubtfully. I’ve done only one thing right, it seems to me. I have surrendered my heart and my real belief and confidence to God’s promises. I believe I will have a husband, or I’ll have peace about not having one. I believe I’ll raise children, or I’ll have peace about not raising any. I believe my writing will be published on yet higher levels, that my career will explode, or I’ll have peace about where it goes. I don’t write for a press. I write for the one who gave me His Word. And my poems are what He fashioned them to be. He may have given Nicole a violin and me a trombone. It’s His orchestra, and I am playing the notes He gave me on the page. I hear the music in my head, and it sounds beautiful to me. If that’s all that ever happens, to Him the Composer be all Honor of it. Amen.

It is the start of the season on Coney Island, Memorial Day Weekend, 2008. The candy apple stands and the flume rides are running. The vendors vend. The Wonder Wheel and its minion wheels are spinning. The air smells like burning popcorn and sugar, cigarettes and sand. Everything glows as if it had always been this way — always thriving, churning.

However, passing by here a week ago, the boardwalk was a ghost town. Only the heavy-set Russian Polar Bear Club members were on the beach in their swimsuits, several homeless drug addicts leaned against benches until cops shooed them away, and the owners stands were padlocked shut with corrugated metal grates. Coney Island looked like the press says it looks now — grim, seedy, about to get torn down to develop condos.

However — just look at it today — it is reinvigorated, as if nothing had ever happened.

Allow me to introduce myself. My name is Anne Babson. I am a Christian writer, a girly girl, a new resident of this neighborhood half-condemned, half-celebrated. This blog will be my window to others into one Christian walk along the boardwalk, sidewalk, and stairwell climbs of the toughest borough in the toughest city in the country.

So what does the reinvigoration of Coney Island’s boardwalk have to do with Christianity?

A Presbyterian minister might give a homily on the notion of resurrection from the tomb. Indeed, that which looked so grim is now grinning. The abandoned is crowded. Christians are supposed to think that even our Lazarus things — those which have started to stink for being so very dead — can return to fullness of life. We are to pray for resurrection in all its forms.

For me personally, this revival of The Cyclone, Coney Island’s wooden roller coaster, is a sign that my own prayers for resurrection in my own life are being answered. Christian writers are not supposed to get divorced, but I have just fled a marriage that spit me out, and I floated up here on the beach with a bunch of seaweed and trash that was pecked on by the seagulls — discarded waste. But that’s not how God sees me. He sees me fully resurrected, able to thrive again, living and loving with total abandon, more and more the way He loves and He lives despite being rejected by so many people.

I buy a corn dog and sit at a table. The three men at the table next to me are speaking Arabic. They watch with great interest as a woman, obviously drunk, on a dare from her friends a few yards from us, runs into the ocean fully clothed, and runs back to receive a beer from each of them.

This place needs prayer.

Fortunately for all of us, a local church, Fellowship Baptist at 2929 West 20th Street, off of Surf Avenue, right around here, has a prayer station. They wear the red and white vests that YWAM manufactures and sells to ministries, hand out Bible tracts in Spanish, Russian, and English — but wish while I stand there that they also hand them in Bengali and Arabic, among other languages. They feed the poor and minister significantly to the addicted, and they have no head pastor — only three elders, amateur Christians, amateur meaning that they do what they do not for money but for love. While I stand there, a man admits in a heavy Russian accent that he is a heroin addict. One elder pulls him aside, makes an appointment to see him the next morning. A Muslim couple, the man with a full beard and skull cap, the woman with her head fully covered, comes over out of curiosity, then leaves. A police officer asks for prayers of protection — in this tough neighborhood, they need such prayers, the cops. A man from Bengladesh comes up to get a hug from a big, burly elder, barely speaks English, probably doesn’t understand half of what is said to him, but he does understand the message, “Welcome,” which has not heretofore been uttered to him since he arrived in the US two months ago.

I ask for prayer, too. The kind sister who prays for me listens briefly to my war stories, then starts praying for my husband to reconcile with me, but she doesn’t know that he threatened my life, expressed repeated, scary wishes for my death. I don’t enlighten her. God knows the ghost town my life has become. God also knows that this is my season for revival, and soon I, through the resurrection power of our Savior, will look like the boardwalk, as if nothing had ever gone horribly wrong.