I noticed several people had viewed this 2009 post so I read it and thought it worth re-posting.
wearing a collar
Several months ago I bumped into a member of St. John's, the parish I
serve, in a grocery store. I gave her a hug and she said, "I don't think
I've ever seen you without a clerical collar."
That's one reason
for not wearing clerical garb--the black shirt and wide, circular band
of white collar--you don't have to...people see you in it anyway. The
truth is I haven't worn a collar for five or six years now but there was
no way I could convince that devoted member of the parish. "You wear
one every Sunday," she said. And I believed that's what she saw every
Sunday.
I didn't stop all at once. It was more like attrition. I lost all my collar buttons at some point and being naturally
abscent
minded, forgot to order more. Collar buttons come in several
styles--most of which don't work. I always used the ones that went
through the little holes in the black shirt and opened like a toggle
switch to hold the collar in place. All the other styles--in my
experience--find a way to edge through the hole in the shirt on the
front or back or slip out of the "
Clericool"
collar. That's what the kind of collar I wore was called, believe it or
not, since it was made of some material that doesn't exist in nature
and probably never decomposes and had little holes in it to circulate
air next to your skin. I kept wearing collars after I lost all my
buttons by attaching them to my shirt with small paper clips, bobby pins
or twist ties I'd take from loaves of bread. The twist ties worked
best, but like they do when holding bread wrappers shut, they tended to
get twisted the wrong way and I'd have to seek help getting them undone.
So,
a second reason not to wear a collar is how hard it is to keep up with
the buttons. When dropped on the floor they were designed to be
invisible until you stepped on them with your bare feet, bruising the
soles of your feet and making you walk funny for a day or two. I once
was holding the button I was going to attach to the back--you have to
attach the front one first unless you wear a collar 4 or 5 inches too
large...which some priests do, I've noticed--and swallowed it by
accident. Well, it was like an accident--certainly not on purpose--I
laughed at something when I had it in my mouth and down it went. Since
collar buttons are not cheap, I watched for it for a few days but
decided that was sick. I hope it came out and isn't discovered in my
next
colonoscopy. That would be really embarrassing, it seems to me.
Finally,
one of the twist ties I was using broke the hole in the collar because I
had worn all the paper off it and the twist tie was like a scalpel at
that point. That was my last collar and since I hadn't gotten around to
ordering buttons I was equally negligent in ordering collars. After that
I wore black shirts without collars for a while, pretending I had on a
collar, but people would say, "did you forget your collar?" a lot and I
got tired of making up humorous responses.
I could, I suppose,
have worn those clergy shirts that have what's called a "Roman collar"
or a "tab collar"--a little piece of plastic that looks like a tongue
depressor--but I've noticed most priests who wear those carry the tab in
their chest pocket, like a fountain pen, rather than wearing it. The
collars I always wore are called "Anglican collars" and I really didn't
want to be mistaken for a Roman Catholic priest. It was bad enough being
mistaken for an Episcopal priest.
Another reason for not wearing
a collar is that it is a 'fun stopper'. You can walk into a really
great bar at Friday happy hour in a collar and practically close the
place down. Everyone is suddenly
siezed
by childhood infused guilt, stops cursing, takes their hands off people
they aren't married to and decides they've had enough to drink. I was
once at a picnic on a hot August day and an
acquaintence
of mine who is also an Episcopal priest, showed up in a summer weight
black suit and a collar. I said to him, "did you have a funeral this
morning?" He seemed confused and went on to tell me he and his family
were going horseback riding after the picnic. I'd never ride a horse
with someone in a collar and I really didn't enjoy the picnic with him
slinking around looking clerical.
I only rode an airplane once in
a collar. Airplanes and collars do not mix since whoever you are
sitting with either wants to confess sins you don't want to hear or
turns out to be a religious nut. A friend of mine who I suspects has
PJ's with a collar on them told me that he flew from LA to Chicago in
his collar and had a sensible conversation with the stranger beside him
until they were landing at
O'Hare.
Then the man said, "what do you Do?" My friend looked down at his black
shirt and felt to make sure he still had on his collar (the buttons
could have slipped out over Idaho and disappeared on the floor of the
plane, after all). "I'm a priest," my friend said. The man replied, "oh,
I know what you Are. I want to know what you Do...."
I've used
that story in several sermons at ordination services. I use it to tell
the person being ordained that 'being a priest' is more about 'being'
than 'doing' and you don't need a uniform.
Just last week I told the wife of a priest that I didn't own any
clericals.
She was somewhere between shocked and outraged. "But don't you ever
want to 'be in uniform'?" she asked. I probably said I preferred being a
'plain clothes' priest, sort of an ecclesiastical detective. And the
truth is, I've never much liked uniforms of any kind. People in uniform
are proclaiming that they 'do' something--direct traffic, drive buses,
conduct trains, fight wars, put out fires, etc. Uniforms are designed to
separate out the people wearing them from everybody else. They announce
for all the world to know, "I am DOING something here--give me room to
do it". A priest, unless a religious service is going on--and we have
these really hot 'uniforms' for those--isn't 'doing' much of anything
that needs space and room to perform. So, no, I don't want to be in
uniform.
Back when I was 'in uniform' I noticed that I could
wander around hospitals with great impunity. I once found myself one
door away from an operating theatre in what was surely a sterile area
because I was lost and not one of the dozen hospital employees I'd
passed since breaking through into a place I shouldn't have been had
called me to account about why I didn't have on a mask and gloves and
those neat little booties people wear in such places. That's really
nuts, to have a guy soaked in germs wandering free in a supposedly germ
free space because he had on a collar. I don't like the deference people
give me when I'm 'in uniform'. I AM, after all, a priest and can inform
anyone of that if they ask. But wearing the uniform forms a shield of
invulnerability and provides a cloak of invisibility to a priest that
I'm not sure is a good idea, especially not a step away from open heart
surgery, or most anything.
(This next paragraph contains graphic
language that most people thing people who wear...or could
wear...collars should never write. I didn't say them, but I will write
them. The faint of heart should scroll down quickly lest they be
offended....)
I was coming back from lunch at a downtown restaurant a few years ago with a priest friend. He was in
clericals
and I had on jeans and a second-hand sports coat. I noticed how people
separated to let us pass--good people, bad people, people of all shapes
and sizes and colors...all except the little old Italian ladies who
wanted to kiss his hand. (Not having strangers kiss my hand is another
reason I don't wear a collar!) Then we met up with this crazy guy who I
knew who always asked me for money. He knew I was a priest in my
tee-shirt and said, drugged half-out of his mind, "Fa-
der, give me two
dol-
lers." I said 'no', quietly and firmly and kept walking. Then he started yelling at me: "Fa-
der, ya are a
muther-fucker!
Fad-er, Ya don't care if I go ta hell...." And kept yelling it louder
and louder. I stepped a step or two away from my friend and all the
people on the street looked at him like he was spitting on the cross for
not helping that poor man. One of the little old Italian ladies screwed
up her courage and said to my friend, "you're shameful..." I just
walked along, smiling, out of uniform.
Finally, I am so liberated
by not wearing a collar because of my neck. Or, more accurately, my 'no
neck'. I am a man whose head rests on his shoulders. If I look up, you
can see my neck, but it is really a 'no neck'. Clerical collars were
designed for people with long, gazelle-like necks. They look fabulous on
people with real necks. Angelina Jolee would look great in a collar. In
fact she would look very seductive in
clericals....Well,
let's don't go there. Suffice it to say, collars were made for men and
women with necks. They look like a kind of necklace on some people. On
me, a collar looks like a hangman's noose and is about that comfortable.
A
dear priest friend of mine had spent all morning laboriously boning the
Thanksgiving turkey and was planning to come home after he did a noon
Eucharist and stuff it in an elaborate way. As luck would have it, he
was distracted and didn't get home until 3, after his wife had returned
from work. He looked in the refrigerator and found his fully boned
turkey (a feat of no mean merit!) gone. When he asked his wife where it
was she told him something terrible had happened and the turkey had
collapsed so she threw it out. My friend was so distraught (being
naturally prone to histrionics) he began, in the good old Old Testament
way, to 'rend his clothing'. He tore most all his clothes into shreds,
his wife told me later, but his collar wouldn't come undone. He must
have had toggle switch buttons or twist ties holding it on. So she left
him writhing on the kitchen floor, choking himself with his Anglican
collar.
That's a final reason not to wear one--it ruins such dramatics....
There
really is no moral to this story. I wore collars faithfully for over 25
years, in spite of the discomfort and how no one really 'looks' at you
on the street and how collars make some people nervous and brings out
the neurosis in normal folks on airplanes. It was simply fortunate for
me that I swallowed that collar button (this is the first time I've
revealed that event, by the way) and cut my last collar with a twist
tie. I just never got around to ordering new ones and everyone who knows
me knows I'm a priest and I am perfectly happy that those who don't
know me don't know that about me. And I'm lots more comfortable.
Besides, I don't think the woman in the super market is the only one who
sees it when it's not there!
(Just so you don't believe I am ultimately
frivolous about this, two stories.
Years ago I was at a meeting with a bishop from Africa who came
from a nation where Christians were being horribly persecuted. When some
asked, "Bishop, what can we give you to help?" he thought a moment and
said, "clerical collars so that when the people are being dragged away
to prison and torture they can see their priests are being dragged away
as well...."
Back after 9/11, I went several times with a group
from St. John's to Ground Zero to work at St. Paul's church, serving
food, praying with rescue workers, just listening to people. We clergy
were asked to wear collars so people could recognize that we were there
for more than giving them lunch and a bottle of water. In that case I
was humbled to wear a collar.
Should such needs arise, I would put a collar on even if I had to use duct tape to hold it on....)
