If you receive an invitation to attend Sunday dinner at your family’s home, do you dress as if you are going to a wedding?
Is it dinner at Grandma’s? You’re wise to show up the way Grandma has told you that you’d better show up.
A priest explained this to me recently: he said in our time we have a great deal of difficulty understanding the difference between “intimate” and “casual.” He said that our encounter with Christ in the Eucharist is always intensely intimate, but it should never ever be casual. We come to Mass to worship and adore, so we ought to dress in order to show respect for the setting. Do we have to have wedding clothing? Well, it ought to be appropriate for some wedding somewhere, a wedding at which display of wealth isn’t the order of the day.
Having said that, we have been on vacation, had unforeseen difficulties, and were faced with the choice of attending Mass in inappropriate clothing or not at all. Lack of appropriate clothing does not automatically imply a dispensation from the Sunday obligation. Maybe if you are so filthy you might damage the interior of the Church or you are dressed in such a way that you are certain to be an utter distraction to everyone present, of course there is a point at which you simply can’t go into a gathering without causing offense, but sometimes some of us may accidentally find ourselves having to fulfill our Sunday obligation in a manner we would not have chosen.
What we do not have is the directive to dishonor those who dress poorly according to our judgment. We have, instead, the very opposite directive:
My brothers, show no partiality as you adhere to the faith in our glorious Lord Jesus Christ. For if a man with gold rings on his fingers and in fine clothes comes into your assembly, and a poor person in shabby clothes also comes in, and you pay attention to the one wearing the fine clothes and say, “Sit here, please,” while you say to the poor one, “Stand there,” or “Sit at my feet,” have you not made distinctions among yourselves and become judges with evil designs? Listen, my beloved brothers. Did not God choose those who are poor in the world to be rich in faith and heirs of the kingdom that he promised to those who love him? But you dishonored the poor person…
if you show partiality, you commit sin, and are convicted by the law as transgressors. (James 2:1-6, 9)
If we allow ourselves to be dismissive of others in our hearts because of their clothing, do we think they’ll never know? Do we ourselves never know when someone is looking down on us? Please. Let’s be real, and conform our minds to the ways we ought to be acting, so we will never be acting duplicitously.
