Dressing Up for Church

A line from Laraine Herring, Writing Begins With the Breath, writing about the problem of establishing empathy with a character, a line that produced an audible “Hmmmpfff” when I read it, punching the breath out of me, the memory it brought back: “As you begin to accept the shadow inside of you, you can accept the shadow in others. Acceptance doesn’t mean condoning action. It means recognizing that piece of each of us that is purely an animal, not dressed up to go to church all the time” (40).

Dressing for church. A PBS episode on “cool hunting” a few years ago had gone with some “cool hunters” into the bedroom closet of a teen in some mid-western U.S. city, to inspect his choices in clothes. He opened his closet and the first thing he pointed to were the suits he had for going to church. The “cool hunters” couldn’t turn their backs on that end of the closet fast enough. What did he wear when he went out with friends or on dates? When he was being his real self, I guess. Not becoming one of “them.”

Dressing for church, a weekly normal and family ritual, not,  as far as I was aware at the time, a metaphor for putting up a front or putting on a mask, was part of the life I was raised in, from very young. When we lived in Claresholm, at the RCAF base, before we moved away in late 1957 because it was being closed in 1958, and my dad, for reasons none of us will ever understand, had turned down a permanent commission in the Air Force at a time when hundreds of sign-ups for the Korean conflict were being de-commissioned, Sunday dress-up for Sunday School and church was just what one did. At least, if one was in our family or my parents’ social circle.

            Somehow, sometime about 1955, my friend Elliot next door got interested in Sunday School. Maybe he was lonely. Probably he was lonely. Elliot was a rarity in the mid-1950s at the start of the baby boom: an only child. I had my little brother Bobby. Over the next five years we were going to be joined (through those mysterious processes only parents seemed to understand) by Ian, Matt and Vicki. Maybe Elliot, who never did get a brother or sister, to my knowledge, and might have been, in the euphemisms of the time, an "accident, wondered what we and other families did all dressed up on a Sunday morning. His parents didn’t seem to have much time for him, even on Sunday morning--something even a seven-year-old could figure out (or maybe something I picked up from something my mother had said, in one of her sniffs of disapproval or disappointment. She really liked Elliot, but not his parents).

            Anyway, as the story went, Elliot had showed up at our door Sunday morning, in his regular clothes, nickel in hand for collection, to see if we were ready to go to Sunday School yet. Bobby and I looked at him in surprise, having been tidied into our Sunday suits, as we always were. “You’re not going to Sunday School in those clothes?” I blurted. Nobody went to Sunday School in regular clothes. Maybe Elliot didn’t know that. Maybe I didn’t know that Elliot probably didn’t have much that was any better—he didn’t have much need for anything you couldn’t go out and rough-house in.  Elliot, apparently, looked hurt and went home, and never did join us for Sunday School that day or later. He probably also wrestled me to the ground and sat on my chest later that day, just to remind me who was boss. That's how we usually re-established effective order in our friendship.

             I forgot about it till years later, when my parents, disappointed in me about something else, put out by my deplorable, insufferable behaviour on some now forgotten occasion, dragged out this gem from the past for further inspection, to remind me of the pattern of my snobbish selfishness: “You were so good because we took the trouble to dress you up, and you had to make Elliot feel bad.” Mom and Dad had been raised in small-town Saskatchewan in the Depression.  They must have seen lots of kids with nothing but the clothes on their backs, having to make them do for church. But also they would have been raised in an atmosphere like that experienced by Rose-Anna Lacasse in Gabriel Roy’s The Tin Flute. She goes half crazy sewing new clothes for her city kids, so she can take them to visit family in the country: “The important thing, the thing that would clothe her regally, was to have her children well dressed. She would be judged by her children.” And I bet Mom and Dad growing up had overheard plenty of nervous class-conscious adult sniping, as others shivered at the sight of kids in less than good dress for church, and thought that “there but for the grace of God go my kids and I.”

             I think what truly horrified Mom, especially, that day was that I was saying out loud to Elliot, whose fault it was not, what she was thinking about Elliot’s parents, that they should be ashamed of themselves for letting him dress for church that way. But I said it. I did it. Obviously it was a flaw in me. I couldn’t have learned the expectation from everyone around me that on a Sunday morning, to stay in God’s good graces, one always dressed up to go to church. That as a well-brought-up child versed in the middle-class superego of the 1950s, I would assume this dressing up was normal, and of course Elliot’s clothes would look strange to me. But, no, Mom and Dad had to remind me of what a brat I had been to Elliot, just like I was being a brat now. Me and my big head. Mom and Dad definitely wanted to keep my head small.

             I should have been raised Hindu, under the influence of Ganesha. I have two small Ganesha figurines in my office, thank-you gifts from colleagues of Hindu backgrounds, who gave them to me after I had helped them with some research or teaching problem or other. Ganesha is the “Remover of Obstacles,” and they gave me the figures in that spirit. But today I also saw a diagram explaining the symbolism attached to all the parts of Ganesha’s body and costume. Ganesha could be a God designed by parents. Observe Ganesha’s small mouth—a reminder to talk less. Or the big ears, a reminder to listen more.

            But he has one problematic quality: Ganesha has a big head, a reminder to think big. That’s something else I was always encouraged to do: set high goals, over-achieve. Just don't get big-headed about my successes; dwell on my failings and shortcomings.

           And always dress for church.