Back to index of vicar's letters - Back to the main index
Shirtsleeve Order
Gentlemen, I have always considered, do not remove their jackets in public. It is not proper to be seen flaunting one's braces, all the while sporting a knotted handkerchief upon the head. I have a seaside photograph of myself, on holiday in Bridlington in the early 1950s, wearing a jacket and a pullover, knee length woollen socks, and sandals. This was how the middle class dressed in the days before global warming.
It never ceases to amaze me that non-churchgoers turn up at weddings and baptisms in a state of undress that is tantamount to nakedness, not so much shirtsleeve order but more of letting it all hang out. And that is just the men. What the girls wear has a profoundly unsettling effect on a chap of my age. We were taught, in ordination training, always to look people in the eye. Now I know why.
Having been given a body which seems to have been made up of other people's discarded spare parts, I have found it advisable to keep it under wraps. A cassock covers a multitude of sins. Little fat middle-aged men with hairy legs and protruding beer bellies, dressed in what seems to be vests and underpants, stare at this properly dressed Vicar as if he were a freak of nature. It takes all sorts to make a world.
And it certainly does. In July we celebrate the life of a woman who was an odd bod in every sense. She has been labelled (entirely inaccurately) as a tart, a whore, a strumpet. She was so mentally disturbed that Jesus cast seven devils out of her. Not the kind of person that we would expect to see in church, and if she did she would, it might be argued, be dressed entirely inappropriately. Yet this was the woman to whom Jesus first appeared after his resurrection; Mary, the head-banger from Magdala; Scarlet Mary, sinner, slut, and social outcast. The problem is that visitors who come to church for the occasional offices, attired as if they were on the way to a nightclub, think that followers of Jesus are straight-laced, puritanical, killjoys, not knowing that Our Lord himself chose to make his startling debut, after his crucifixion, to a woman who did not quite fit into polite society.
May God bless you all, Fr. Allan
Back to index of vicar's letters - Back to the main index