Leaving Church - Barbara Brown Taylor [14]
In the language of the Church, I was sensing a call. In the Episcopal Church, however, that was far from enough. God does not ordain people directly, as more than one bishop would tell me in years to come. The Church ordains people in whom it recognizes clear gifts for ministry, and the process of discerning those gifts takes as long as it takes. In my case, it took close to five years to go through the screening program, meet the additional requirements, make my way through the committees, and pass the exams. I also quit the process at least twice, but in the end I was given permission to order my new clothes.
Never having worn a collar myself, I could not imagine how it felt from the inside, but I had a pretty good idea how it worked from the outside. Once, when I was lost underground in the Times Square subway maze in Manhattan, I was saved from a full-scale panic attack by the sight of a nun in traditional habit. I did not for one moment consider that she was there for any purpose other than to rescue me, and without disabusing me of that notion she kindly pointed me in the right direction.
Picking up the plastic collar in the transatlantic shirt box with my name on it, I remembered her. The collar was not a wimple and I was no nun, but I knew that wearing it would change me because it would change how people responded to me. But first I had to learn how to put it on. After fumbling with the collar, a pair of collar studs, and a black shirt for close to thirty minutes, I finally figured out how they all went together. As I stood in front of the bathroom mirror studying the full effect, a visual memory earlier than the subway nun surfaced in my sight. When I was a little girl riding in the backseat of the family station wagon to visit my relatives in south Georgia, I remember looking out the window to see men in black-and-white pajamas working in the fields.
“Why are those men dressed like that?” I asked my mother. Turning around in her seat, she explained that they were state prisoners, who were dressed like that because the uniforms made them easy to see. If they tried to escape, she said, then the guards could find them quicker, and if they showed up at some farmhouse looking for food, then the people who lived there would know to call the police.
“See how they stand out?” she asked me. Staring out the rear window of the car, I watched them until we were a quarter mile down the road. Then my stomach fluttered as the station wagon crested a small rise and went down the other side. With the convicts gone, I turned around to face the front seat with a bad crick in my neck.
Looking in the bathroom mirror twenty-five years later, I could see how I was going to stand out too. For good or ill, I too would have a hard time escaping. As my beloved rector had told me in seminary, being ordained is not about serving God perfectly but about serving God visibly, allowing other people to learn whatever they can from watching you rise and fall. “You probably won’t be much worse than other people,” he said, “and you certainly won’t be any better, but you will have to let people look at you. You will have to let them see you as you are.”
Clearly, the uniform was designed to facilitate that. My new clothes said, “Keep an eye on this person,” without granting me any real control over what others made of what they saw. As if to prove my point, my husband of five months walked by the door and stopped to stare at me. I looked at him and tried to smile. He looked at my neck and did not smile.
“Is that really necessary?” Ed asked in a tiny voice, as we both measured the distance the collar