on costumes and courage

Our worries are manifold lately. Our fears are not play things even on Halloween.
I will spare you the long list that begins with war mongering politicians and ends with diseases contagious only in impoverished places.

All this has me questioning the value of protection. How is it we place such a high value on something so elusive? It's an illusion really and yet we're nearly addicted to it.
We think of buildings as something stable and strong. But children of domestic abuse and adults facing foreclosure know this is often wrong.
We think of clothing as a descriptor, a message that we ought to be respected or at least we have covered our private parts. Also an illusion.

Today we don costumes (my daughter's preschool class looked like a little zoo (with one puppy dog and one garden gnome)) and tomorrow we will celebrate saints who took vows to wear burlap, cover their heads and live simply. Today we play a part, wear a mask and pretend our fears are only a gesture toward death; tomorrow we celebrate those who revealed truths that were not hidden by God-but hidden from us by our denial.

Around this time in 2009 I ordered my first clerical collar (not for Halloween, mind you). It was a size 8 (I wear a size 2). I took it to my mother-the woman responsible for a large bit of my spiritual (inner) tailoring as well as my diminished physical stature. She reverently hacked away at it so I'd look less like a toddler wearing one of dad's dress shirts.

I am still not always sure what it is for, what it does or when to wear it. I know there are obvious answers. But I like to say I am open to the mystery (mystory?) of it... if only because I am hoping to stay open to it's impact on me and my context.
The nose ring, the tattoos, the facial expressions I wear are not quite so mysterious. It's a little easier to predict who they may offend. Honestly, if I count the number of people offended by my tattoos it is equal to the number of people offended by my collar... only those offended by my collar often feel oppressed, rather than justified(!) in complaining about my garb.

The collar is not a costume, nor are the nose ring or the tattoos. They are more like monuments to who I have been and how I got here. They stand out against the landscape of my past and my future as well as all my relationships, they remind me that life requires bravery more often than it requires adequate protection.
They remind me that while protection is a rare privilege and often a mirage, bravery is not an illusion; Bravery is facing the reality and risking to change it.

I wrote the following poem after I opened the box that contained my mail order, 100% cotton monument
to the courage required by my position as a pastor
but more importantly to my position as a child of God.


This Cotton

I am caught on is from
A Fortress: just a phone call away.
I give the orders.
And it arrives and its small brown box, too light,
Belies the misgivings.

Oh carrier of this holy calling,
You are more than a covering;
You tighten around my neck—
A collar: like the rising at the bell
This tintinnabulation tab -
let rangle me—
I choke on each word.

And I am to become
A Friar: fire tucked
below the belt.
Sustained by alms, the scratching of the sack
Cloth, sloth, wrath, pride, lust, envy, gluttony finally wrapped in a showy snowy shroud.
And I am drunk with power
on the spirits that burned my nose and throat, and finally fell into my gut.

You knit this while I was yet in my mother’s womb, weaving past and present,
Bring me back to!
A woman will convert you and I: in an upstairs room with a machine
Darting back and forth this way and that–
my mother tightened the white, in her affinity, her cotton for my skin,
(She is using the same machine to fix it in place
That once quilted scraps of my youth)
Bolting from the bolt:
Lightening—no, not weighing any less—
Rather, striking again and again,
Leaving crass like glass (see how my skin shows through!) where once was
One tiny stone, one Word among words,
atop a million others battered
against the water and roiling in the foam of hope.
And this cotton testifies that I too started from beneath your feet
But you never would have guessed—
I rose too high too fast—it was the busiest of illusions.

And you will know me, if you see me
A Vicar: vicarious curio, proudly displayed
Lined up behind a man, among men
Who fit better into this weave.

But mostly I am still…

A Woman: of the cloth
This (clo(th)ing) that bears buttons
Like batting and battens down, hatches all around me—
The flames of Pentecost
Or Jeremiah’s fire
Burning from the inside
Burying me in the white heat
And all that remains is to speak over you
And I: ashes to ashes,
dust to dust, and cotton enough to catch them.