The price was right, so I bought it, did some wiring, and voila! A fabulous new light for the back bedroom, which serves as an office of sorts.
Of course, I had to go find the Bible (yes, I have a Bible. I also have a Koran and a Book of Morom. Not that I've ever read any of them, but I think having them makes me look smart.) and pose for a tableau.
Which inspired me to create another tableau, using one of the dogs. Since Crackers is the only one who will sit still for that kind of nonsense, he was the lucky one who gets to join me in a devotional reading....
But here's the thing: I bought this lamp entirely for its lines. The crosses, I'm not so sure about. The ugly truth is that there's an awful lot about religion that is campy, and this fixture is a prime examples of that campiness (The lights were in a church, which is a de facto religious place. Why did they feel the need to put crosses on all the light fixtures? Even Catholics don't do that).
But do I really want to go there? I don't want to be seen as one of those people who makes fun of religion, even though I do, all the time. But I prefer my ridicule to be on a case-by-case basis, and not a blanket ridicule of the entire thing, because people like that tend to be bores (Show me a person who calls himself a "recovering Catholic", and I'll show you a real pain in the ass.) and, I hasten to add, some of the people I love the most are sincerely devout.
So what to do? I can easily take the crosses off, or turn them upside down and hope everyone just thinks they're a innocuous decorative element. But it would be just my luck to have some devotee of St. Peter (or, even worse, of Archbishop Joachim of Nizhny Novgorod) come by and think it was some sort of shrine to them. (those devotees of the Archbishop can eat you out of house and home)
Or am I just over-thinking this? Talk to me, people.
