Unitarian Universalist Church of Palo Alto

Robes, Roles and Rites

Reverend Amy Zucker Morgenstern
October 2, 2005
Palo Alto, CA

In From Beginning to End, Robert Fulghum explores some of the rituals we develop to give structure and meaning to our lives. His friend Alice developed a series of morning habits that, she came to realize, were a ritual, complete with ritual garments. He writes:

Determined not to begin the morning with a sense of urgency, she stretched and yawned and stood still, looking out the window. She didn’t turn on the lights right away — the artificial light was too jarring — so she was content moving about in the soft half-light of daybreak, or else, in winter, with candlelight, putting on this new day as comfortably as she put on her robe.

Her robes were seasonal. She hadn’t exactly planned it that way, but that’s how it evolved. In winter there was a long, warm deep purple terry-cloth robe her mother gave her for Christmas. It was beginning to fade, but she liked the connection with her mother and her childhood. The robe, like her relationship with her mother, had softened with age.

In spring she changed to a new blue-and-white cotton kimono given to her by a Japanese exchange student she had befriended. It made her think of faraway places where she had never been.

In summer there was a white chenille bathrobe with a pattern on it that reminded her of the spread on her grandmother’s bed. She found it at a neighborhood garage sale. Instant nostalgia. And she was childishly amused by the patterns it left on her skin when she lay down on the couch in it. It was the closest she would come to having tattoos.

And in the fall she wore a cotton robe her husband had brought her as a surprise gift from a business trip somewhere. Printed with flowers — mostly orange and yellow and red — like the colors of leaves in autumn. She wore this robe at other times, as well — when he was away and she missed him, and when he came home — to please him.

… [These robes] were useful, practical garments, but when she thought about it, she realized she wore them as much for the feelings and memories they evoked as for their physical comfort. When I told her I thought her robes had become like temple garments, she smiled and replied, “Yes.”

When I was a brand-new UU minister — I won’t even say “newly minted,” because my ordination was still several months away — I arrived at my first congregation, in Rutland, Vermont, and wanted to collect information about the important rituals and practices of the church. So I asked one of the elders of the church about Christmas: what I could expect on Christmas Eve, what were the elements of the service that absolutely must happen, that we always did and I should make sure I knew about as I planned the service. So she told me about how we did candlelight and carols, and certain things that we always sang or said, and that was all very helpful. And then she closed by saying, “Oh, and you get to wear your fancy duds.” I didn’t know what she meant at first — I thought, “Well, I always wear a nice dress, of course, especially for Christmas Eve.” But no, what she meant, was Christmas — and the implication was, only Christmas — was the time that I could wear a robe and stole. So I took that message and I borrowed a robe for Christmas, not having one yet myself; and I didn’t wear a stole, because to me that was a mark of ordination; and I also took away the message that Christmas was a special occasion and that robes and stoles were only used for such exalted times and not for other times.

As I said, I was very new at this.

And so that’s what I did for several years: I wore my robe and stole on special occasions. And that’s what I have been doing: wearing them for weddings, for dedications, for funerals, for ordinations and installations, and at some of our services such as Christmas Eve, Flower Sunday, and Water Communion. That seems an appropriate division: that these clothes are for very special occasions. But more and more, that distinction has troubled me, because isn’t the Sunday service a special occasion, every Sunday? We come with broken hearts and we seek to heal each other; we seek communion with one another and the best that we know. When we enter this hall and this hour, we do so hoping for transformation. This is a special, a sanctified, a set-aside time and place in our lives.

I think that her ambivalence, and my own, about the seemingly small matter of what the minister wears, goes to the heart of a balance that we as a religious community try to maintain: we believe that the secular and the sacred are inseparable; in fact, that they are one and the same. Special clothes that declare one space and time sacred seem, by implication, to devalue the rest, as if what happens outside these walls is not as important as what happens within — and we don’t believe that.

And yet it’s a complicated issue. In his groundbreaking book, The Sacred and the Profane, required reading for religion majors everywhere, the historian of religion Mircea Eliade, talks about the constant human process of delineating sacred space from profane space (in other words, ordinary space), sacred time from ordinary time. He begins with the assertion that in profane existence, in our ordinary lives, space is homogenous: every place is the same as every other; no place has a special status. In sacred existence, things are set apart: sacred places, like temples and churches; sacred times, like holidays and hours of worship; sacred objects, like our chalice. As I read this, my already nascent UU soul was protesting: “Well, can’t everything be sacred? Do we have to have this division? In order to have sacredness, does there have to be ordinariness?” And I felt vindicated when ultimately, I got to where Eliade seemed to be defining the sacred, because he says basically that the sacred is reality. Whatever is most real is most holy; sacred moments, rituals, spaces, days, those are the ones in which reality itself is heightened and we feel most alive--we feel most full of being. One of the purposes of church, of worship, of Sunday morning is not to take us out of the ordinary, but to bring us that heightened awareness of reality. One of the functions of this place is to be that sacred space for us, where we can have that realization.

It seems to me that in what we do in church, we’re trying to hold two ideas in tension — and they are not in conflict, but are both necessary and complementary. One is that everything we do and experience, every place we go, every moment of our lives, is sacred, and in that view, church is a seamless part of the rest of existence, no different than our gardens or our kitchens or our city streets. And this is true.

The other is that we seldom realize that everything is sacred, and so church is where we go to be reminded of the holiness that flows through everything. And so this building and this hour are a focal point, they are a channel for all that we hold sacred — and this is true as well.

So … how do we dress when we come to church? Even completely opposite approaches seem to express answers that are not so much in conflict as they are in balance. Some people always wear a suit or skirt to church; they polish their shoes, they put on a little extra jewelry. They seem to be saying: For me, what happens here is important. It's a special occasion, like a night out or a birthday dinner. I come hoping that something will happen that is beyond the ordinary, unusual, and that it won't be just like any other time. I want to bring my best self to church, so I'm going to wear my best clothes.

And then, on the other hand are people who wear jeans and work shirts. They seem to be saying: I’m comfortable here. I can relax and be myself; I feel like I’m at home. I come here hoping that I will find something that applies to the rest of my life — in fact, I want my whole week to be the same as church. I want to bring my whole self to church, so I'm going to wear what I wear in private, when I'm just being myself.

Two very different approaches, both expressing respect and honor for what happens within these walls, but emphasizing different sides of the balance. One emphasizes the different-ness of sacred time and space, and the other the essential oneness of the sacred and the ordinary. We need both of these approaches. What the minister does, being only one person, I’m not sure. Maybe wear pajamas with the robe and stole over them.

See, another tension we sense when it comes to clothes and church is that between role and reality, and that’s not a problem just for the minister. We want to be genuine — we want to be ourselves and not pretend — but we also want to step up to a particular role and responsibility, to an ideal that is not the one we attain all through the week. This tension is especially pointed in the matter of what the minister wears, and I think it's another reason that many of us respond so strongly — whether positively or negatively — to robes and other vestments. The robe itself commands respect: it serves notice that something special is going on here. A person in a robe is more remote, less approachable, not quite occupying ordinary space and time. This makes a great deal of sense when the leader of the service is mediator between the people and their God, and so it is no wonder that the Bible details the special costume the priests of the Temple had to wear, right down to their undergarments (which, in case you're wondering, had to be made of linen) (Lev. 16). But we Unitarian Universalists reject the idea that people require any mediator between themselves and whatever to them is holy, and so we are rightly wary of anything that sets the minister apart.

At the same time, there is this matter of a particular role that is undeniably played by whoever leads the service. Vestments could be, ought to be, less about the person wearing them than about that role. In fact, they can focus our attention on the role instead of the person, which can be desirable. I think of the case of Buddhist monks, with each shorn of his personal belongings and wearing identical robes, in order to help them shed their petty likes and dislikes, their personal tastes and preferences, and concentrate their being on the tasks of meditation and service. Even in the case of the priests of biblical Israel, the elaborate costume might have been intended to put the focus on God rather than on the person who happened to be the channel for the people's sacrifices and prayers. When the priest put off his street clothes and put on the vestments, he was removing his own personality and taking on the role that must absorb him if the people were to commune with their deity. In Unitarian Universalist terms, we might say that the priestly role is to create the atmosphere that will help the people gathered to be inspired and changed.

One colleague of mine communicates with her vestments that it is the priestly role, rather than her personality, that is at the center of the service. She wears a robe and stole for the service, and then, in her words, takes them off before she hits the coffee pot. When the service is over, she's back to her plain self; that way, the robes say something less about her than about the event that has just taken place.

This comes closest of any approach I know to striking the balance I seek between the complementary aims of church, and so, having gained more confidence in my own judgment than I had that first month of my ministry, I have come to the decision to wear vestments during services as well: to declare this a special occasion. And then, of course, to return to my street clothes when I step out of this set-aside hour: when I step out of this place and this role.

In this church, there’s the added wrinkle that we have a great deal of lay leadership of services. If the specialness resides not in the person but in the role, perhaps laypeople, too, should wear robes when they lead the service, in order to put on the authority of the role that they, like the minister, assume for that hour. I wonder what that would be like? Add that to the choir’s perennial debate about their role as leaders of the service and what they should wear.

But now, let us step away from church for a few minutes to look at the other ways what we wear acts upon us and shapes our sense of our role and what we are to be. In so many parts of our lives, we dress for a role, however innocuously: we dress for a job interview, we dress for a party. In a sense, we’re playing a part, and like actors moved by the power of performing, we find that the role starts to play us. We choose clothes to fit an occasion, and the occasion shapes us until we fit it.

O. Henry wrote a story about this power of clothes, a cautionary tale called “Lost on Dress Parade.” A poor young man, Towers Chandler, saves a dollar out of his pay of eighteen dollars each week so that once every ten weeks he can have a night on the townÑat the time of the writing, ten dollars would make that possible. He dresses as a gentleman, dines in a fashionable restaurant, and for one evening, in O. Henry’s words, he "play[s] the wealthy idler." On one such evening he stumbles upon a young woman like himself, a poor shopgirl. Or rather, she stumbles upon him; she slips on the ice and twists her ankle, and he helps her to her feet. He gallantly invites her to dinner, though she is shy about appearing in her plain dress and cheap hat when he is in his evening finery, and they enjoy one another's company. Then they part ways, and the reader learns what Chandler does not: just as he is masquerading as a rich young man, she is masquerading as a poor young woman. In truth, she lives in a mansion and is as weary of her rich, idle life as he is of working for only eighteen dollars a week.

Perhaps the story could have had a happy ending if Chandler had been frank about who he was and how he was only playing a role, having a little fun on his evening out. But even as they were talking, the story relates,

… the Madness of Manhattan, the Frenzy of Fuss and Feathers, the Bacillus of Brag, the Provincial Plague of Pose seized upon Towers Chandler. He was on Broadway, surrounded by pomp and style, and there were eyes to look at him. On the stage of that comedy he had assumed to play the one-night part of a butterfly of fashion and an idler of means and taste. He was dressed for the part, and all his good angels had not the power to prevent him from acting it.

So he began to prate to Miss Marian of clubs, of teas, of golf and riding and kennels and cotillions and tours abroad, and threw out hints of a yacht lying at Larchmont.

When they have said goodbye, he says to himself, "That was a stunning girl.… Perhaps if I'd told her the truth instead of all that razzle-dazzle we might &mdash but, confound it! I had to play up to my clothes." And she, for her part, goes home to the mansion and tells her sister that although she knows she will have to marry one day, and will no doubt marry in society, the kind of man she would like to marry would have "some work to do in the world."

"I would not care how poor he was if I could help him build his way up. But sister, dear, the kind of man we always meet — the man who lives an idle life between society and his clubs — I could not love a man like that, even if his eyes were blue and he were ever so kind to poor girls whom he met in the street."

What is so sad about this little tale is that Henry makes it clear that the two young people really do feel a connection between them in their brief encounter. If only Chandler weren't "playing up to the clothes," they might have discovered that in spite of the gap between her riches and his poverty, they had a lot in common. But having begun playing the role, he found it was playing him.

Perhaps you are familiar with less dramatic examples in your own life. Casual Friday leads us to talk and work in a more relaxed way (sometimes to the dismay of our employers). Putting on formal clothes for a wedding reminds us of the solemnity of the occasion. Our clothes inevitably shape our behavior. That's one reason why we choose the ones we do. What we wear to church or anywhere else shapes how we feel and what we do. Like Alice's bathrobes in today’s reading, our clothes exert an influence; they become a part of the day.

But the power that our wardrobe has to shape us poses us a challenge. What is the line between taking on a role and losing track of who we really are? To distinguish between ourselves and our roles is not easy. We may try to solve the problem by wearing just "our favorite clothes" and "what we're most comfortable in," but then the question always arises: but what are your favorites and why do they make you feel comfortable? Isn’t it because of the way you interact, isn’t it because of the roles you want to take on? Why else does one person feel comfortable wearing sweatpants to the supermarket, when another would feel as uncomfortable in that outfit in that place as if she were wearing a bikini to her grandfather’s funeral? We each have a sense of what ideal we’re trying to attain as we pick out our clothes.

It takes some reflection to dress in accordance with who we really are and what we want to become; it requires that we know ourselves, which is one of the reasons we come here to church. Since, like Towers Chandler, we’re going to live up to the clothes we choose, we’d better choose clothes that fit who we really want to be.

Another colleague, when asked what was appropriate dress for a minister leading worship, went to the heart of the question by answering metaphorically, and he did mean this metaphorically. He said that whatever ministers wear, robes, stole, business suit, or dress, they ought to be spiritually naked. They should stand before their congregations just as they are, without pretence, with their souls bared, without sheltering behind a role or inside a costume. And I think he’s right.

I would suggest that it is not only the minister, but all of us who need to ask, “Who am I when I’m not wearing any costume? Who is the person within all the roles that I play?” We can never quite shed the roles we wear, just as we are always shaped by the clothes we wear. They are always a costume to some extent, something that speaks of who we are, and so there will always be the tension and the question, “Is that who I am? Is it who I want to be?” Like Alice, we may find that what was just an old bathrobe becomes a temple garment. Or, like Towers Chandler, we may find that what was just a lark becomes a serious misrepresentation of who we really are.

What we can do is choose our roles carefully and make them not playacting, not pretending to be what we don’t really want to be all the time, but like Alice, make them as close as possible to what we want to be. My colleague who distinguishes between what she wears in the service and what she wears at the coffee hour has a hold of this truth. It seems to me, although she didn’t phrase it this way, that she wears the vestments to draw herself closer to the ideal she is trying to attain and the ideal she is setting for her congregation. And then, because she also wants to model being true to her everyday self, she walks into the crowd in her dress and gets herself a cup of coffee.

We come to church to try on the role of member of a perfect community: the beloved community of compassion and justice. We come here to try to bring about that revelation, that state of heightened realization, that is so hard to sustain everywhere even though it is possible to attain anywhere. We practice it here, and all the accoutrements — the chalice flame, the high ceiling, the banners like stained glass windows, the unnatural sense of quiet in this great space — like the set of a play, help us to move into the reality we seek, that reality that flows around us all the time, but whose pull we unconsciously resist. And then we make the transition, deliberately, clearly, with the putting-off of a robe or the words of peace we share with one another, and we carry the self that we have rediscovered here into the everyday world, out into the rest of our lives. So may it be every time we gather.