I am 23 and my hair is thinning.  Noticeably.  At first, I was not okay with this.  I am too young and the old legend about male pattern baldness running through maternal lineage had proven to hold little or no weight.  To be honest, I am still not entirely comfortable with it but conversations with professors and classmates have sparked an embracing acceptance of my newly revealed scalp.

One day in class, we got on the topic of African-American hair (which I happen to be unusually knowledgeable about!  For basic info, watch Chris Rock’s Good Hair).  Our instructor asked if any of us had any personal connections to the topic.  I quickly raise my hand exclaiming that as a man with thinning hair, I also do not fit into a normative category of beauty or what is deemed attractive in Western popular culture.  I am marketed to constantly with advertisements for Rogaine, hair plugs, or transplants that I am still not sure are scientifically plausible.  All of this money is spent to make me feel uncomfortable with losing hair; that it is unacceptable for me not to do all that I can to “fix” my “problem.”

In this class, a colleague posed this question: How can you say that I am made in the image of God and later say that my hair, which is a part of who I am, is not beautiful because it does not fit a particular mold?

Now, I know there are issues and discrepancies with what it means to be made in the image of God but those aside, our bodies have, in some capacity, echoes of the Divine.  What is on top of our heads is just as divine as the capacity of what is inside them.  In other words, there is nothing wrong with balding and I make sure to tell people this when they show their concern for my “premature” hair loss.  Often, I make jokes, claiming that I am going for a medieval monastic look.  The act of religious hair removal is called tonsure and has been and is practiced in a number of different faith traditions.

Although I love contemplative and ascetic forms of religious praxis, my thinning scalp does not require this of me!  But my decision to embrace my baldness is rooted in religion.  In a Pastoral Care and Theology class, we were discussing the role of religious leaders and how aging was viewed in churches.  Is it right for religious leaders to reinforce societal premises of beauty by dying their hair to mask the gray or botoxing the wrinkles away?  In my case, would I be setting a good example for my congregation by trying to disguise my baldness?  Or would I be further telling my congregants that being bald is not in the beautiful creative plan of God?

I am not arguing that Christian leaders or their congregants need to look drab.  Instead, I am rejoicing in the fact God has already created us as beautiful, even when society claims that our looks are inadequate or lacking.  My thinning hair is not the end of the world; it is an example of beauty in the world.  I hope this post can encourage each of you to discover the beauty that is within.  You do not need to call it the imago Dei; you can call it whatever you wish but always call it beautiful.