How to Get Young People to Come to Church

Since our move to Chicago, my Woman and I seem to spend a lot of time church-shopping-- you know, finding the church that's right for us. In the meantime, we've seen how blessed we were before with two wonderful churches --thank God for St. Clare's and Canterbury House-- and how hard it is as "young people" to find a Home in the church. So, although this is rather off topic, I have a list of things I'd like to say to every church I've been to that's trying to recruit "young people."

How about you? Does this list match up to what you wish you could say to your churches or synagogues or mosques? What would you change?

So, here we go: Allie's 10 Sure-Fire Ways to Recruit "Young People" to Church

1. We get enough advertising campaigns from Apple and Ikea. Skip the marketing and be real!
2. We like pop. (Some of us.) We also like hip-hop, rock, jazz, techno, country, 18th Century Charles Wesley hymns, and genres you’ve never even heard of.
3. Talk to us if we show up to church.
4. If we’re not showing up to church, don’t give us flak about it! Our reasons for going or not going to church are just as complex as anyone else’s.
5. Try not to beg for money too hard. When you need to beg for money (because don’t we all in this economy!), refer to #1. It’s not about give-the-church-money-or-you’ll-rot-in-Hell; I’m pretty sure God would be just as content with my donation to Unicef. A church is a business just like everything else. You need money to keep the lights on and pay the priest and buy materials for the Sunday School classrooms. Tell us that.
   
6. We, like everyone else, need to participate. This doesn’t mean we need our own special group, although that’s sometimes nice. Welcome us into your choir, let us teach Sunday School, or invite us to Bible studies.
7. If you have a group for us, please stop trying to be cool unless you’re already that cool to begin with. Why? For starters, not all of us are cool, so we don’t need a church that has all the same cliques as the rest of our lives. And lets face it, we can tell when you’re faking it, so please refer to #1.
8. Don’t make us choose between our faith and our friends of other faiths. If you do, odds are good we’ll pick our friends-- not because we don’t believe, but because we don’t want a church we can’t bring our friends to.
9. Don’t be stupid about science or social issues-- if you have to be stupid about them, be stupid quietly. Lots of us stay away from church because all we ever hear about church is how church-goers “don’t believe” in evolution or gay people. If church focused more on worshiping together than pushing beliefs on people, it’d appeal more to us.
10. On that note, don’t force us to believe things and be open to doubt. Everyone doubts-- think Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane or Thomas after the Resurrection. If we have to have all our doubts cleared up before we walk in the door, you'd never see us! (You probably wouldn't see half your older parishioners for that matter, either!)
    

Religious Justifications for Immodesty

So I spend a lot of time on this blog talking about my religious justifications for modesty, but truthfully, I believe that God really just wants us to be humble and not worry about what we wear. (Check out the specs on that here.) Modesty makes sense for me, but it may not make sense for everyone.

Since I feel this way, and since I know many religious people who don't believe in religiously-motivated modesty or believe in what I'll call religiously-motivated immodesty (ie. that God is okay or promotes us wearing things that aren't modest), I feel like I should write about it!

Perhaps one of the biggest argument for religious immodesty is that God, in all God's wisdom, created us naked. Genesis 2:25 "Adam and his wife were both naked, and they felt no shame." The nakedness isn't the sin of Adam and Eve. Neither, mind you, are the clothes, but the clothes are emblematic of the sin: eating from the tree God told them not to eat from was the sin, which resulted in them being ashamed of their nakedness, so they made clothes for themselves.

Let's think about that for a second: our first sin as humans as symbolized by clothes-- God knows we sinned because we came out of it clothed. Forever after that, every (or nearly every) human over the age of, say, 2 wears clothes.

Let's pull back and personify God for a second. (I think that's appropriate because much of Genesis personifies God.) A friend of mine describes Genesis as a love story. And I so agree. God has angels. Why would God create humans? Answer: humans have free will and God wants to love a creature that chooses to love Her. Being loved and praised by creatures that are unable to do anything besides love and praise you isn't nearly as fulfilling as being loved and praised by a creature you gave the free will to turn away from you.

So God orchestrates this beautiful love story, creates humans and gives us stewardship of the whole earth and what do we do? We turn away. The marker of this change in the relationship is that humans now wear clothes. For millennia afterwords, humans continue to wear clothes. Rubbing salt in the wound much? Now, God is infinitely loving, so She has forgiven us this, but it still looks like we're just trying to piss God off, doesn't it? That right there is a fabulous argument not to wear any clothes at all. Of course, generally speaking this is an impractical argument, because most places in the world won't let you be naked.

Now let's talk about Jesus's feelings about clothes.

Jesus denounces even the most splendid of clothes as not as beautiful as what God has created. ("Consider the lilies, how they grow : they neither toil nor spin ; but I tell you, not even Solomon in all his glory clothed himself like one of these" Luke 12:27.)

Jesus continues, "If that is how God clothes the grass of the field, which is here today, and tomorrow is thrown into the fire, how much more will he clothe you—you of little faith!" (Luke 12:28) What I get from this is that we need to relax and not worry about what we wear. What one might get from this is that the "clothes" God has provided for us (our skin, our hair, etc.) are enough and we don't need other adornments.


So there you go. Two basic arguments for religious immodesty.
1) Since clothes are a symbol of our first sin against God, the wearing of them and --worse!-- the fussing over them is a continual reminder to God of our sin.
2) Jesus even told us that what God gave us to cover us should be enough for us, at least in the way of beauty. We could not find any kind of clothes in the world that would make us more beautiful than the way God made us.
Actually, in fairness, these are probably better arguments for religiously motivated nudism, rather than immodesty, but it's what I've got.


Anyone else have thoughts on this to share?

Job Interviews

So I just graduated from college and I've been doing a lot of job interviews. It's interesting how it has made me analyze my own modesty and head covering practices.

I have to ask myself: do I want to be noticeably religious? I'm still not sure. Is being visibly religious like being the light on the hill or like being the pharisee on the street corner? And is being blatantly modest analogous with being visibly religious? (To this last one: I think it depends on context. At work, modesty is not inherently religious; at the pool, it might be.)

I've been debating these questions the past couple of days.

Today, I was on my way home from the temporary job I just acquired, and I read The Interior Castle by St. Teresa of Avila (the only book recommendation I've ever taken). She had two points that I think help with this whole light on the hill/pharisee on the street corner question. And, because I like quotes, I shall quote her.

I warn you: abandon yourselves [to acts of devotion] only under the condition that you harbor no illusions about the Beloved being under some obligation to repay you for your sacrifice with divine favors. [...] What can we offer such a generous Beloved, who died for us and breathes life into our being?


She's speaking to her sisters in the convent and talking about, in particular, giving up worldly goods. I think she probably also intends it to cover other acts of devotion as well. If you are doing anything, really, because you think God should reward you for it, you aren't "walking humbly with God."


I've never really thought of of tzniut or head covering as something that should bring repayment from God. Isn't everything we do supposed to be repayment to God? God loved us and created us and then we blew God off. God came to down to earth to teach us the way Home and we killed God. God has done everything for us and we, as a whole anyway, have been brutally unreceptive. So I think all our lives should be repayment back to God-- mind you, that's hard to remember even on my best days.

That's where the head covering comes in, I think. I, as a human full of faults, don't always remember to live my life as an offering to God. The head covering is my reminder. If it acts as a label to identify me as Christian or religious, that's fine, but it is first and foremost for me.

Walk Humbly with Your God

I teach Sunday School to 5th and 6th graders. They are a very intelligent, very energetic group.
Today, we were studying (among other things) Micah 6:8 where God calls on the people, instead of sacrificing oil and animals to Her, to "do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly with your God."

Our activity involved making lists of things people in general and my students in particular could do under the headings of Doing Justice, Loving Kindness and Walking Humbly with God.

Some suggestions I got for Doing Justice were:
Stand Up to Bullies
Put Terry Jones in jail
Protest (Oh, Ann Arbor children)

Some suggestions I got for Loving Kindness were:
Helping children who are lost
Giving people hugs
Not being mean to people

Walking humbly with God was by far the hardest. But I told them about tzniut and how tzniut is based pretty much entirely on that part of this verse (source). Then they got into it and here were some of the suggestions I got:
Do what people tell you
Don't brag
Don't dress in a way that makes people pay attention to you

After this last suggestion, many of the students started to defend why they dressed to attract attention. (I mean, come on, many of them are in junior high and the rest will be soon.) However, one of my (male) students, who I'll call J, said in a remarkably thoughtful way, "I don't usually dress to make people pay attention me..." He paused, and then added, "Except my Converse."

I had to smile-- I loved that he thought dressing not to make people pay attention was important when all of his classmates were arguing against it. I also loved that he was willing to admit that he did wear his Converse shoes sometimes to attract attention! I think God would approve, for sure.

Happy Belated Easter, everyone!

So Happy Easter! Sorry this made it up a bit late-- I went to Easter Vigil, then celebrated my Easter by sleeping in and then working at our local Domestic Violence Shelter-- where I wrote this (in the down time), but didn't get a chance to post it until now.

So today was my first day as a "free woman," so to speak. I also stressed out way more about clothes today than I have in at least a week. And don't get me wrong, clothes were stressful all through Lent, but now I have to decide what I want to wear rather than what's clean that I can wear that matches. :) Truth be told, I don't know what I want to wear.
So here's me trying to figure that out...

I know that I don't see pants as immodest or unfeminine. (To prove this last point, take any one of my jeans and put the butchest man you can find in them and he will look very feminine.) I do, however, see pants as a pain in the neck and not nearly as much fun as skirts.

Not many of my skirts are much shorter than 3/4 of the way down my thighs, but a good handfull of them don't cover my knees. I wore one of those today. With leggings. So my knees wouldn't feel totally bare.

The top was way more trouble for me. You see, I have 34DD boobs, which means that shirts that don't show one whit of cleavage on anyone else, show a lot on me. Today, I wanted to wear something that maybe didn't cover my collarbones, but also wouldn't show cleavage. In fact, maybe that's what I want all the time. I'm not sure. Either way, I own 2 shirts that fall into that category-- and both of them were dirty.

So I ended up wearing a shirt that covered my collarbones, but had short sleeves. I also covered my hair.

One of the big things I learned from Lent is this: my basic outfit of jeans and a t-shirt or jeans and a sweater may be comfortable for me, but it doesn't feel like honoring God. Not because of what I reveal or don't reveal necessarily, but because I want to think about God every moment of every day and I'm not. (Now, the odds of me actually achieving this are slim, but hey, a girl can dream.) So in order to achieve that, I'm going to start covering my head. It's not in obedience to Paul's command in 1 Corinthians... because I don't have a husband to show submission to. And also because I think Paul is a crock... a well intentioned crock, but a crock nonetheless. I plan on covering my head so that every time it annoys me, every time I have to fix it, every time I fuss about finding one that matches, I remember that God is always over me. That's the idea anyway. If it doesn't end up working, I may change it.

Another thing I learned from Lent is that there are parts of my body that I think should be between me, my Woman and God. And that's okay. And it's not necessarily parts of my body that I have issues with. Some of them are, but even then, the reasons I was having issues with them were because I expected the whole world to see them and thus, the whole world's opinion mattered. When I narrow it down to my Woman, my God and me, well... my Woman and my God like all of my body-- it's just me who needs to catch up. :)

Funnily enough, I think these areas correspond pretty well with the Mormon rules, which require that the clothes cover Temple garments (the women's are on the right). I think my body from my breasts down to 3/4 of my thigh should be covered, maybe my knees. I'm not so sure about cleavage yet-- simply because I'm unwilling, I think, to throw out all the clothes that show cleavage on me. I do think my shoulders should be covered almost all the time. (I'll make an exception for swimming.) And, although the Mormons never specifically state this, I think when the weather is cold and everyone else is wearing long-sleeves, I should wear long-sleeves most of the time too. To be honest, I don't think this has changed much since the beginning of Lent. I've simply learned that it's okay. I don't have to be okay with showing all of my body to everyone.

What do I think God thinks of this?

Well, as I've said before, I'm pretty sure God would prefer it if we didn't fuss about clothes at all. I shall work on that. In the meantime, I think God's pretty okay with my choices. Do I think God is also okay with what "Anne" wears? Yeah. Do I think God is also okay with what the women at the SlutWalks wear? Yup. I think God wants us to be comfortable in our bodies, to respect our bodies and to treat them as Temples of God, whatever that means to us. I think that can be done in all kinds of clothes.

Mann traoch, Gott läuch.

That, my friends is Yiddish for "Man plans, God laughs," at least as far as google is concerned.

I'm pretty sure God's laughing at my Lenten Discipline.

Here I am, trying really hard to strictly abide by modesty rules and what happens on my pilgrimage to Lourdes? Of course, to get in the baths, everyone strips (in relatively discreet places, I might add). I was naked as the day I was born in front of at least 3 women who I'd never seen before in my life and will never see again. It was such a shock to my system after so much modesty that I was shaking even before I was plunged in the icy water.

However, this experience that was enabled by these moments of total immodesty was an amazing moment for me. I'm not sure I feel "cured." (I don't think I'd know what "cured" felt like, anyway.) However, being in the bath (albeit briefly), felt like walking into a Mass that I didn't know was going on-- this suprisingly wonderful reminder that I am part of something much larger than myself.

Being dunked in the water, I was reminded of my baptism (and every baptism I'd ever seen or heard of), especially Jesus's baptism, I was reminded of all the other people who had been dunked in this water, all the people who wash their hands in it (including St. Bernadette), I was reminded of all the people who bathe in the Ganges, but maybe coolest of all, I was reminded that God gives us these reminders not only in holy places, but every time we encounter water.

Christianity (and many other religions) picked some really basic elements to make holy. Water in baptism. Food and drink in the Eucharist. Oil in the chrism. Sticks, well, branches, in Palm Sunday. Although I'm a thorough believer in transubstantiation, I think Protestants got one thing right in the whole it's-a-symbol concept. It is supposed to be symbolic everytime we pick up a piece of bread anywhere. My pain au chocolat this morning? Symbolically, the body of Christ. A reminder of the Eucharist I will partake in this evening, which is the literal body of Christ.

Eucharist

Several years ago, the deacon at my old church gave a sermon that sticks with me now after attending 3 Masses so far here in France. Now, I'm very bad at paying attention to sermons and I'm doing this from memory at least 3 years on, so I may not get it all right.

He was talking, as I recall, about why Episcopalians put so much weight on the Eucharist and not on the Bible (not, at least, as a literal, premade document). He compared two people growing old, one of whom was very Protestant and who's central "icon," if you will, of the faith (by which I mean what represented the faith to them) was the Bible, and the other of whom was Episcopalian and who's central "icon" of the faith was the Eucharist. Both of them were losing their eyesight and, in some ways, their understanding, so the Protestant was struggling with their faith because they were losing their ability to read and comprehend the Bible, which was their tangible connection to the faith. For the Episcopalian, even though they were losing their sight and comprehension, still had the Eucharist to hold on to. They could still experience the Eucharist, even when the Bible was inaccesible to them.

Having attended Mass here in France in 3 different churches and in 2 different languages, I get that. I love the beauty of being able to walk into a Mass and understand what is going on without knowing the language very well. It feels like the most accessible link to God possible-- a way to access God through something we humans have to do all the time anyway-- eat!

In a way, that's kind of what I'm looking for in covering my head-- a way to access God through sometihng I do every day.

Day 2

So I have a big long feminism post that I will finish eventually, but I'm on my second day and I'd just like to throw out a few observations.

1) Living in a co-op (with men) has made this more difficult than it might be otherwise. For instance: It's 2am and I have to go to the bathroom. What do I wear down the hallway? The answer turned out to be a Senegalese pagné (pronounced pawn-yay) and a sweatshirt, but it was a hard call. One thing I love about this is that it makes me aware of God all the time-- which is awesome.

Me and a bunch of other people wearing pagnés.

 2) I walked down the street today and so many people stopped and stared at me that I thought I'd cause a traffic jam. Now, this is Ann Arbor, guys. On campus. I've seen people walking around in fairy costumes that get fewer looks than I did today. And it's not like I was doing something weird. (For instance, the other day, I was wearing a hijab and an ambulance went buy, so I crossed myself. Understandably, someone stared at me-- obviously a little confused.) I was walking down the street in a long, brown coat, a mid-calf-length jean skirt and obnoxiously brightly-colored rainboots. My Woman rated it a 5 out of 10 on a scale of weird Ann Arbor outfits. I just don't get it...

I, and Hafiz, think God is pretty ok with drag

I knew I couldn't have been the first person to have thought of this.

Corroboration of the idea that "We are born naked and the rest is drag" by a suffi poet, Hafiz.
The Sun in Drag, by Hafiz

You are the sun in drag.
You are God hiding from yourself.
Remove all the “mine” – that is the veil.
Why ever worry about
Anything?
Listen to what your friend Hafiz
Knows for certain:
The appearance of this world
Is a Magi’s brilliant trick, though its affairs are
Nothing into nothing.
You are a divine elephant with amnesia
Trying to live in an ant
Hole.
Sweetheart, O sweetheart
You are God in
Drag!

What God Wants Me to Wear, Part 2

Okay, so there's a line in scripture (Deut. 22:5) that says: "A woman shall not wear anything that pertains to a man, nor shall a man put on a woman’s garment, for all who do so are an abomination to the Lord your God." This is oft-quoted as why tzniut women should not wear pants. I believe a good handful of other religious groups follow this as well (think Mennonites, Seventh-Day Adventists, etc).

Yeah... but Jesus says: (in Matthew 6:28-32) "Why do you worry about clothing? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow: they neither toil nor spin; and yet I say to you that even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. Now if God so clothes the grass of the field, which today is here, and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will He not much more clothe you, O you of little faith?

 Therefore do not worry, saying, "What shall we eat?' or "What shall we drink?' or "What shall we wear?' For the Gentiles run after all these things, and your heavenly Father knows that you need them."

Jesus asks us why we worry about what we wear. I feel like the clueless disciples. "Well, uh, Jesus, we're pretty sure God told us to..." But Jesus is presenting us with this idea that maybe we're wrong.

So how did we go from God-vehemently-hates-women-wearing-pants-and-men-wearing-skirts to God-says-don't-worry-about-your-clothes?

Let's look back at the Deuteronomy quote. I'm going to interpret it as the Bible saying God doesn't want us to dress in drag. In analyzing this interesting piece of scripture, I'm going to quote well-known theologian :) RuPaul, who says, "We're born naked. The rest is drag." Therefore, I'm going to extrapolate that God doesn't want us clothed. This actually might not be that far off. God created us naked and then we Fell. We Fell and were ashamed of the beautiful bodies God gave us, so we decided we needed to cover them up. If I made a masterpiece of a sculpture and gave it to you and you decided to put a blanket over it, I'd be pissed. I wonder if that's how God feels. Looking at it that way, maybe my Lenten discipline shouldn't be to follow more strict rules about clothing, but not to wear clothing at all. Unfortunately, I think that's illegal. So, I guess we should continue the analysis.

Short of moving to a nudist colony, I have to wear clothes sometimes. What does God say about that? Well, let's check out Matthew 6:32 again. "The Gentiles run after all these things and your heavenly Father knows you need them." To me, that sounds like God sighing and saying, "Wear clothes if you must, but don't fuss about them, okay guys?"

Oops. Amn't I doing just that? Worrying about my clothes? Then I should tread very lightly on this Lenten discipline of mine. The last thing I'd want is to turn worrying about my clothes into some kind of idol. The goal is wear these clothes and any time I'm about to worry or fuss about them, I pray. And maybe God is just shaking God's head at all this BUT, I sometimes think God must shake Her head throughout all of Lent-- like, hey guys, I gave you food, why are you ignoring it? Hey guys, you've got enough suffering on this earth, why are you inducing more of it for yourself? Who knows? If I'm wrong (and at least part of me has to be wrong, since I'm thinking conflicting things), I imagine God is just giggling and patting me on the head and murmuring, "It's okay, darling," as I fuss.

What God Wants Me to Wear, Part 1

Okay so, Orthodox Jews, Muslims, Amish, Mennonites, Mormons, Fundamentalist Mormons, Catholics (that's approximately 2,339,803,500 people)... everybody thinks God has an opinion on what I wear. Many of them disagree about the specifics, but all those people think God is pro-dress-code. This makes me wonder, does God care what I wear? So, in the next couple of posts, I'm going to look at the rationale behind religiously-motivated dress codes and re-think some of my own ideas about God and clothing.


One of the reasons I picked tzniut (versus, say, following Muslim dress code rules or Mormon dress code ruels) is because of the reasoning behind it. Of course, they have the obligatory women-should-cover-up-so-men-don't-succumb-to-temptation clause (more on that another time). However, they also say that the reason there are clothing rules for b'nei Ysrael (children of Israel) and there aren't for b'nei Noach (children of Noah-- ie. the rest of us), is because Jewish people, as God's chosen people, should be dressed like royalty. I like that, but it runs contrary to many other beliefs about clothing and religion.

Often, the goal of Christian modesty rules, at least as far as I can tell, is so girls and women don't draw attention to themselves. Hence why many denominations insist their women dress the same way. I've never bought this explanation. Of course, that's certainly one way to learn humility, but it's always rubbed me the wrong way. God made us unique for a reason. We all stand out in God's eyes, don't we? So I think if we're trying to "blend in" it ends up being more about shame than humility. Shame about our bodies brings us back to the Fall-- Adam and Eve at the fruit from the tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil and their eyes were opened, they saw they were naked and they were ashamed. That shame about our bodies was the first result of our Fall. I don't think Christianity should aim to replicate that in it's clothing.

So what about this "royalty" concept?
This reminds me of when I was writing health curricula.One of my tasks was to create a lesson about sexual abuse/"where no one has the right to touch us"/Good Touch-Bad Touch. Well, we know the Good Touch-Bad Touch curriculum  was a failure. If you have any doubts about this, feel free to ask my Woman-- she'll tell you about how some of the 5th and 6th graders at the summer camp she worked at last year developed a game called Bad Touch Tag.
So I was looking for better models than that and I found a lesson from a Christian curriculum that I liked. The day before, you asked the children to bring in an object that was valuable to them. When they brought it in, everyone had the chance to show it off in front of the class. Then, you asked questions like, "Do any of you keep these in a special place?", "Do you only take these out on certain days or for certain things?" and finally, "Are only certain people allowed to touch these?" After that last question, ask them why. Maybe prompt them with an example: Ask if anyone has a younger sibling. Pick someone and ask, "[Annie] is your [sister] allowed to [wear] your [locket]?" When the answer is no ask why. Inevitably, you will hear at least somewhere in this something like, "Because it's mine and it's special to me." Then you say: "Our bodies are like that. Our bodies belong to us and God and they are special to God." You go on from there about the who/where/how/when of touching.

Maybe, this dressing like royalty is simply a way of saying, "My body belongs to me and God and it is special to God." Just like Annie might keep her locket in a special compartment in her jewelry box, I'd keep my body in special clothes, be they tzniut or hijab or temple garments or what-have-you. Does that make any sense?