FATHER FRANK’S RANTS - Rihanna’s Boobs

Rant Number 458 28 September 2011

‘I never heard of Rihanna’, Northern Irishman Alan Graham said. Neither, praise God, had the priest. Until this morning, when listening to a radio phone in. Now the existence of such creature is known to me. And the matter of her naked boobs, displayed on Graham’s property. ‘Inappropriate’, the Christian landowner termed the singer’s partial nakedness. He also spoke of ‘a greater God’. Puzzling expression. Anyway, if God is brought in, maybe God’s Word, the Bible, should get a look in, so that, perhaps, naughty Rihanna should be told.

Before I give it a go, let me share with you a personal anecdote. When a Curate at Chiswick Parish Church my Vicar, Patrick, warned me about visiting women living alone, after six p.m. ‘Don’t worry, Father’ I told him, ‘my virtue is unassailable’. So one day I went to see Ms Blenkinsop. ‘Would you like some tea?’ she kindly asked. Yes of course, so she went next door. A few minutes later she walked back into the room, completely, stark naked.

So, nudity in the Bible. Yes, Adam and Eve were created naked but that’s not the first example I thought of. Rather, because of a theological chat I had had earlier about Ham’s progeny, it was the case of Noah in Genesis 9. After the Flood Noah gets drunk (Come on! Who would not need a drink after going through something like that?). One of his three sons, Ham, sees him sleeping naked – his descendants are cursed. The other two sons, Shem and Japhet, who averted their eyes from their father’s nudity, are commended: their offspring will prosper.

Judiciously, I consulted my reference tomes on Genesis 9. Problem is, they are too sophisticated. The Jerome Biblical Commentary, a Roman Catholic affair keeps mum about it. So does the old, largely protestant Peake’s Commentary, or an even earlier High Anglican Scripture Commentary with the Apocrypha. Nudity in the Bible as a topic presumably was felt too passé – or even prurient, perhaps? - by the learned scholars who glossed our passage. So I had to turn - mea culpa, mea maxima culpa – to the Internet. What a relief – an embarrassment of riches there. Penned largely by Protestants. Well, what’s so bad about that? Protestantism and Englishness are almost synonymous – Scratch an Englishman, find a Protestant – wrote Irishman G.B. Shaw. The poor priest is Italian but he is an Anglican and the Anglican Church is partly protty, so...that’s kosher.

The minds of the Victorians, those goodly ancestors of today’s drifting, paganising Englishmen, were still sufficiently shot through with biblical knowledge and imagery to find natural and congenial the idea that nakedness=sin=punishment. Visit, pray, the stunning John Martin exhibition at Tate Britain. Martin was a painter of catastrophic, spectacular dramas. In huge canvasses like ‘The Great Day of His Wrath’ and ‘The Last Judgment’ he depicts the cosmic upheavals an avenging God will inflict on his creation. Look out for the tiny, naked figures. They are invariably amongst the sinners. The righteous, however, are all decorously clothed. Could not be more biblically correct.

Yes, Adam and Eve were created naked. In Paradise, living in close communion with God, there was no shame so it did not matter. Immediately after they ate the forbidden fruit, however, ‘their eyes were opened and they knew they were naked’, so they make themselves clothes to cover their bodies. Sin entails shame. Wonderful moral...

It would be tedious to rehearse all the many biblical passages concerning nudity. But they are not all unambiguous. King David once dances naked before the Lord, for example. God commands Isaiah to walk around naked and barefoot, although that may be symbolical. Nonetheless, Leviticus 18 has a series of ordinances against nakedness. Aaron, Moses’ brother and the first high priest, exposes the nudity of the Hebrews who had worshipped the Golden Calf. And the Gospel of St John (21:7) says that Peter put on his fisherman’s garb, so that Jesus should not see him naked. Generally, in the Bible the image of nudity is connected with idolatry, sin and fornication and that’s that.

Muslims, by the way, cover the parts of the human body called the awrah. Surah al-A’araf has relevant Qur’anic passages. Islamic Law invokes prophetic hadiths in this connection – my Islamic friends can sort that out. But I don’t reckon you’ll find many Muslims arguing that nakedness is quite halal.

Rihanna, I suspect, does not give a toss about the Scriptures, although she, hailing from Barbados, might well have had a Bible in the family home. But I cannot totally blame her. As for years semi-nudity and lewd conduct have been splashed out all over the media, as well as publicly praised and practiced as most normal things, naturally our society has come to regard them as harmless as sucking lollypops. (Amazing what you see on Channel 5 these days – pornography is too kind a word for it.) Hardly surprising if the young behave accordingly. Shame today is chiefly confined to unspeakable sins like racism, anti-Semitism and anti- multiculturalism. Only religious ‘fanatics’ and human dinosaurs make the occasional noise about sexual morality. Groan...degeneracy has set in – short of the Apocalypse, or the return of the Hidden Imam, we are stuck with it.

My heart goes out to Mr Graham. An Ulsterman. The English are very snooty about his lot. Bigoted, narrow, intolerant, all the clichés apply. I should imagine the British Government would be quite happy to hand over Irishmen like him to the Republic. Yet the people of Ulster on the whole care more about Christianity than most present-day Englishmen. Even Ian Paisley, awful as he used to be, strikes me as preferable to, or, after his fashion, more Christian than our ‘bland Dave’ PM. Actually, Mr Graham has behaved in a most mild, reasonable fashion. He said he wished ‘no ill’ to the bikiniless girl. There goes a good Christian for you. There are still a few left...

Oh, and nude Ms Blenkinsop? What happened that night in Chiswick between the Curate and the parishioner?

But nothing, of course.

Revd Frank Julian Gelli