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Americans perfume and paint their women because they think them pigs worth only their meat. This is completely at odds with the ancient Church, where She decorates Her women because they are something to behold and be held. This is a deeply ingrained idea inherited through the Mayflower Pilgrims from the Manicheist heresy of Calvinism. We have enshrined it in the ditty, “Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me…” By Manicheist I mean to say, the rejection of some matter as evil even though it was created by God.
This is interesting. I have been thinking about how I clothe myself. I come from strong Evangelical roots. I had three brothers and my mother was afraid I would be vain so she cut my hair very short and dressed me very plain. When I went to my first healing ministry many years ago, the pastor asked me for some special childhood memory, whatever came to mind first. What came to mind was a pair of pink bell-bottom pants with white “powder puffs” on them (in the pattern of the fabric.) I told her I Ioved those pants, and she wanted to know why. It was because I was dressed so plain all the time, and those pants made me feel like a girl, and I really liked being a girl, but my parents never made me for special for that. So she prayed a prayer for healing for the loss of not being treated special like a cherished princess. I liked that prayer, and even though it had never occurred to me that my parents had done anything wrong, it comforted me.
I was born-again in college I practiced the Evangelical tradition. Later as a member, for a time, at a Plymouth Brethren Church, where I counseled with the pastors wife weekly for a year, I was continually encouraged subtlety, not explicitly, to ignore how I look, basically. Plain dress and ill-fitting clothes - tent-like dresses (coverage being the priority) - were the norm. And spending as little as possible on clothes was the only value in shopping. So I obediently ignored style and channeled my guilty interest in clothes into the
colors and hues of the clothes… And I am still very picky about color!
I think this church was the extreme of pilgrim-like simplicity. But this and probably their “Umbrella Theory” which messed up my life, made woman unhappy and undervalued. Or at least, they did not celebrate their femininity. This was illustrated most strongly on an area-wide Bible retreat I went on annually for awhile. The ladies’ sleeping room was a giant upstairs attic room full of cots. Well, you could not sleep at night. The snoring was so loud, as soon as we went to bed, that I though someone was playing a joke on me! It was a cacophony! It was like everyone was yelling! I had to leave the building and sleep in a chair in the mess hall. Subsequent years I brought ear plugs…
As to the snoring, the fact was, there was an
unusually disproportionate (compared to the rest of society) amount of
very overweight woman among this group. Well we woman do tend to put on extra pounds, and not all overweight woman are unhappy, but I my feeling is that this very noticeable difference with this group is because of philosophical and theological teachings made these woman more unhappy on the inside than they seemed on the outside. On the outside they were all very dear salt-of-the-earth people. But when I converted (by that time i was a Baptist) it was rejecting the Umbrella Theory (that I was taught there) that unlocked the way for me.
I would further guess now, and this is only a recent thought, that they did not
enjoy their marital intimacy with their husbands. Because if they were fulfilled, there wouldn’t be so much hunger to overeat. I think this would be a natural result of being in a sub-culture that devalues women. And I have long-thought, since converting, that the main problem in this and other Protestant faiths is the absence of Mary, who is only mentioned in the annual reading of the Christmas story, who “certainly had other children!” because in actual essence, God
used her body to get His son here and then she didn’t matter really after that…
Back to clothes. I am a convert now, and the first thing I noticed was prayer postures and kneeling, sitting standing, sign of the cross- because, this is different: in Catholicism, the body matters! It is so different from my Protestant tradition, where to be holy meant to pretend you didn’t have a body…
So now, a few years (since 2000) hence conversion, and some time away from a bad marriage, I am getting into clothes for the first time. I enjoy putting them together for fit and style and celebrating the beauty God adorned me with as a woman. I am also an artist, so, this is an expression of that for me. My style harmonizes with the particular way God made me. Last year a friend started buying “me” clothes that looked terrible on her. I told her that I could help her pick something out that was “her”. Her style is completely different from mine. Using tools of things I have learned from reading, she was enthusiastically on board for a total revamp, and cut her hair in a new style and colored it back closer to its original, and got almost all new clothes - we did this so thrifty; thrift-stores and clearance sales - and her new style always get noticed. She wears things I would never wear but they are so her, and make her shine. She gets so many compliments now and is so confident. She looks years younger.
Next post! That was too long!
