I feel a bit like Columba setting out in his coracle from Ireland, making his way across the sea not knowing what or where home would be.
Following this leading of Plain dress is curious and surprising. I didn't/don't know in what directions I would be taken or whatever destinations I would find.
I have been afraid that actually I may have completely flipped and this is an embarrassing symptom of madness. Even if it is, I still have to do it, because it feels that strong. It has recurred in waves in my life until the accumulation of the wave-swell has amounted to a tide that has taken me out on a new sea. It’s what I have to do. The sense of acute embarrassment at looking different, standing out, attracting attention, which would normally deter me from most things, feels profoundly uncomfortable but I think (if I just stay with it) in time people will simply get used to me and I will become who I am and settle into the new landscape of being. Does that person in the picture look halfway sane to you?
I can hardly bear to contemplate what my mother will think and feel at the sight of me in a prayer cap. She is used to me enveloped in voluminous dresses of one kind or another, since I’ve returned to them like a homing pigeon since I was fifteen. I think my eccentricity has been a trial to her. She bears this with dry kindness, tolerance and dignity. It is not her style.
I dread making the visit that I have been so looking forward to later on this month, to an open evening at a Christian intentional community with Hutterite origins. I can imagine their curiosity and the question marks in their eyes, and it makes me want to run for cover to even think about it.
I have felt intensely guilty as yet again, struggling to find my feet in this powerful undercurrent of the sense of Plain calling, I find myself starting again with clothing. This feels (and indeed is) wasteful; but the benefits are worthwhile.
I have agonized over the distinct frumpitude of my appearance, given that descent into middle-age makes me less lovely by the day; I am a married woman, and my husband did not sign up for Plain. This causes me a sense of serious inner wobble. But I still have to do it. I just do.
Those have been the uncomfortable, difficult things. The rest has been good.
When I dress Plain, it’s as though my soul slips into the socket it was made for and settles to a contented state of peace. You know when you’re driving a car and if you’re doing it right the engine runs quiet, without strain? My engine runs quiet in Plain dress.
As I had hoped, it effects recollection: acting as a continual silent reminder of who and what I wanted to be. It changes me. As The Message translation reads in Jeremiah 18:4 "Whenever the pot the potter was working on turned out badly, as sometimes happens when you are working with clay, the potter would simply start over and use the same clay to make another pot." That feels like what is happening to me. This difference drops into the context of my life like a pebble into a pool: it is making the members of the household different too, as though I had donned a large notice saying FORGET NOT GOD. There is a new tempo, a new rhythm, of Christ-centredness organically emerging in our home, that feels wholesome and good.
And tonight, having been thinking so intensively about it all, voyaging fearfully into the new, I feel flat and weary. Change is neither exciting nor welcome: I want this new reality very much, but I want it settled in as normal and part of everyday.
To their everlasting credit, in merciful kindness, not one person has asked me ‘why are you wearing that hat?’ or said anything unkind at all. I feel immensely grateful for that.
I have wondered if it is all an appalling dilettante fancy dress fad. I have felt terrible that, a divorced woman married to a divorced man, tumbled uncertainly between different religious groups and currently unsuccessful in my efforts to put down roots in a faith community, my life is only a travesty of what my appearance now stands for – life surrendered to Christ and hidden under God’s sheltering wing. It feels painful to know I do not (and never now can) match up to what I should have been: but even still, I know I have to do this.
It is returning me to a simple, honest, heartfelt sense and practice of faith that I once had but it got tarnished and bent out of shape over the years. It feels so good to find it again, to speak honestly and openly with people about the things of God and the life of the Peaceable Kingdom.
Perseverance. That will be the key.