Plain and simple

In the late 1960’s I attended Blackburn College, a small, old-fashioned Presbyterian university in a small town in downstate Illinois between Springfield and St Louis. I was a Chemistry major my first year; then, I switched to History for the remainder of my time there. One of favorite professors was Dr John Forbes, an orthodox Quaker of firm convictions. He was my hardest history professor. Hardest because most demanding. I never saw this happen, but it was rumored that if a female student entered his lecture hall in jeans, he would ask her to leave and not return until she was properly attired. What did he mean, ‘properly attired’? She had to wear a skirt or dress, not jeans or slacks. Like I said, I never saw this happen, but I never saw a female student in his class wearing anything but ‘proper’ attire.

This morning, reading an interesting post at Aunt Melanie’s new blog, Walk in Wisdom 2, I left the following comment on the topic of the Orthodox dress code. I decided to post it here, in case other non-Orthodox visitors to our churches and monasteries have wondered about why they were required to dress ‘properly.’ This explanation is nothing more than my personal response to this issue, but I hope it will help bring some sympathy to what can often be a tense and confrontational situation.

Orthodoxy has a dress code, plain and simple. Yes, it is a relic of an earlier age. In everyday life, most women have discarded this code, except in church services where, only in the last couple of years where I go to church, women have begun appearing in slacks, but that is still considered irreverent somehow. It was always understood that women might appear in church for an evening service in slacks or business clothes because they hadn’t had enough time to return home from work and change into a dress or skirt. But at an ordinary Sunday service, the dress code, though not enforced or enforceable, was expected. Men wear pants, women wear skirts. If a man appeared wearing a skirt, it had better be a kilt (that is permitted, and some do wear kilts to church in the American Orthodox Church), or he’d feel very odd. Orthodoxy, like Judaism, comes from a cultural context in which men approach God together without women, and women without men. In some very traditional churches, like the Eritrean ones, the congregation is still sexually divided, men on the left facing East, women on the right. Exceptions permitted? Yes, of course, for reasons.

Back to the dress code. Girls and even women, wearing skirts in church sometimes appear as immodest as can be, skirts so high above the knee, and with shoulders exposed. It’s not just about skirts, it’s about modesty. If you appeared at a women’s monastery in a mini-skirt and short sleeved, or no sleeved, top, the sisters would cover you up somehow, or simply tell you not to enter the church. If a man appeared there in a short sleeved shirt, or wearing short pants, he’d likewise be refused entry. The women’s monasteries will be harder on women, softer on men, and the men’s monasteries the reverse. But I do not expect to enter any monastery beyond the guest house or reception area, wearing anything but long sleeved, modest garments appropriate to my sex, or an anderi (a long, usually black, robe worn by men who are serving in the liturgy as cantor or acolyte, or by the monks themselves, also called a rasso). This is part of the discipline imposed by the Church on all members. It acts as a leveler, somewhat like dress code, school uniforms, in the public school systems of some foreign countries.

The requirement for you to wear a skirt or other non-trousered female garment (culottes are not okay either) inside an Orthodox church or to a monastery is also designed to root out of you exactly the sentiments you are expressing in this post. ‘How far can any church extend itself into the personal life of the individual? Unless it is a matter of religious principles, values, and morals, I do not think any church should tell me how to live my personal life.’ Especially, your last sentence, is what makes it pointless for you to visit an Orthodox monastery. The Christian life is not about what we opine or what we feel. I know you know that, and I am not blaming you or taking you to task for it. I have the same kinds of thoughts. But in the end, I know that the Church is right to put us back in our places this way. It’s not about power, as people think. It’s not about the Church telling us what we can and cannot do. How do I know this? Because every day I see the Church publicly making merciful and loving exceptions to these very rules. I know that they know that I know that they know the rules (or the ‘canons’ as we usually call them) are not about the rules, but about us, about what we are and what we will be, if we only submit ‘without opening our mouths’ just as Christ did as He was being dumb before His shearers like a lamb.

Here is a tangible difference between Orthodox and Roman Catholic and Protestant attitudes about the spiritual, the Christian life. I hope I haven’t offended you in any way by anything I have said. Of course, again, it is not about what we wear or don’t wear. It is not about the rules. It is about yielding without resistance to those constructive hands that the Lord has in fact and act afforded us for our molding into His image. Yes, Mary of Egypt went stark naked, but the fact is, she didn’t try going to a monastery. She had no need of it. Her place was the desert with the wild animals, and yet the Church numbers her among the greatest of the saints. She was no evangelist. She was no almsgiver. She was no bible reader. She did not receive communion even five times in her entire life. But she is a saint. And so are you. And so am I. As long as we submit without holding back, even to the humility of obedience to people no better or more worthy or smarter than ourselves. This is difficult, even impossible, to the natural man, but to the spiritual, what can I say?

‘Let us love one another, for love is of God, and love is God.’