I don't think this blog post is especially hilarious - it's just that I was laughing when Alice took the photograph!
Polyphonic church music did not come in until the mid-to-late middle ages. Up until then, religious communities sang in unison. When polyphony came in, it was regarded (at first) with suspicion as definitely fancy, probably sinful, certainly worldly – Plain Chant was preferred. Then most of the church just got used to it, though a few stuck determinedly to unaccompanied unison singing as the spiritual way to go.
When I get lonely, I wander around Plain dress and modest dress websites and blogs, so I can rest my eyes on somebody who looks like me. Sometimes I feel a bit like the prophetess Cassandra of ancient Greek legend, who had a mean old curse on her: she would always tell the truth but nobody would ever believe her. In similar wise, I seem to be afflicted with the longing to dress just like everybody else but feel compelled to dress in a manner that is like nobody else in my circle and locality at all.
Or, almost. I was buying box files in the stationers the other day when the lady serving at the counter asked me in a voice Pregnant With Meaning, “Are you from Robertsbridge?”
Robertsbridge is a Sussex village about twelve miles inland from us. As Hebe, who was with me, said later when we were laughing about the conversation together: “Why? D’you want something taking there?”
No, what the woman meant is that there’s a Plain community there – of ex-Hutterians, and they dress pretty much like me. Or me like them. Or something.
But in general nobody much looks like me – though a Brethren woman passing through Silverhill (where I live) whipped her head round sharpish and gave me a very penetrating look when she spotted me a couple of summers back.
As they so often say to me filing out at the conclusion of a funeral: ‘What are you?’ Good question. What indeed?
Anyway, feeling lonely and a bit cut off from the herd this evening, I was mooching around the usual blogs enjoying looking at other women who dress Plain and reassuring myself I am not mad, when I came across one of the usual discussions about not drawing attention to oneself.
The point being made was that dressing Plain (assuming the woman in question not to actually be Old Order Amish / Mennonite or whatever) was OK so long as you weren’t doing it to draw attention to yourself. I stopped and thought about that for a long time. What kind of woman, I wondered incredulously, would dress like this in order to draw attention to herself? I mean, I know it does – but it’s not the right kind of attention, is it? The kind of attention a woman draws to herself on purpose is to look sexy and slender and elegant and chic and glamorous and successful and all that kind of thing. Well, I think Plain dress is beautiful, in its own funny way, but it’s certainly none of those other things. The attention it draws is the kind where people snigger at you or feel sorry for you, or wonder if you’ve come from a re-enactment venue. People I don’t know say hello to me now I dress Plain: and the people that do are very evidently residents from institutions – I think they simply mistake me for a nurse.
I find it wearing, embarrassing, isolating and very, very difficult. No, I don’t want to draw attention to myself. But in this garb I am myself, I am at peace, my soul sits right in its socket: that’s just how it is.
But then later I got to thinking about the Amish/Hutterite thing about uniformity: the kind of not drawing attention to yourself where you all dress the same because individuality is frowned upon as a temptation to pride and the desire to stand out – drawing attention to oneself.
I thought about (okay, I was ironing by this time, and I always think a lot when I’m ironing) our little troupe – this tribe and its friends and associates. We aren’t exactly a community, but somehow we’re a bit more than a family, because we live our lives ethically and intentionally, and try to make our choices in the light of Christ. In this house, we live simply, and we draw people to learn about the Bible and the way of Jesus, and we try to build the Peaceable Kingdom every day in all the ordinary little decisions and actions that make up a life.
But we don’t have rules about it, and we do not demand uniformity – never have. There’s never been a time when I told my children how to dress or whether they could dye their hair or have piercings or not. I believed in talking things through, teaching by example, and respecting their choices. Seems to have worked.
The thing is, I don’t really think you can get away from individuality and difference. They interviewed some Poor Clare nuns (Franciscans) on telly a few weeks back, and I was struck by how strongly evident was their individuality: dressing all alike made them more individual, not less. Fashion is a uniform just as much as Plain dress is, and dressing Plain makes the personality very vivid, somehow.
I have noticed over several decades acquaintance with (and affection for) Plain people, that Christian groups that have strict rules about adherence to uniformity have to express difference by church splits, because there is no room for difference to be contained within the group.
Every time real difference occurs, there has to be shunning and excommunication, or a whole new church started. This is surely a very expensive and disruptive and stressful way of dealing with difference of opinion. If a man’s entire family have to be severed from their kith and kin because the chap decides it would be a good idea to drive a tractor, I’m not wholly convinced that is altogether constructive: though I do indeed see why agreeing to do without tractors makes a farming community more interdependent and therefore more tight-knit.
If you don’t have the rules you can hold together in love, simply respecting each other’s differences when they crop up – as, people being people, they surely will.
There are casualties to either system, of course. The fewer the rules, the greater the level of self-discipline must be, for the community to hold faithfully to a Christlike life. Without rules, you have to (be able to) trust each other.
For example, I recently read that the Amish call television ‘the sewer in the living room’. Okay. Well, that’s very vivid! But it made me wonder what on earth they thought I might be watching on telly! Last night I saw a programme about the architectural vocabulary of church buildings (how they express the theology of the faith community in bricks and mortar). Straight after that I watched a programme I had been waiting to see, that is going through week by week the unfolding history of one particular ancient village through the ages. Last night we were on the fourteenth century. As I am writing a Christian novel set in the fourteenth century right now, I was keen to see it. ‘The sewer in the living room’? Why?
So, assuming we agree that not all programmes are suitable for Christian people to watch, and there’s an awful lot on the telly it would be better not to see, there are two approaches: either we can make a rule that members of this church may never watch telly in case they watch something sewer-ish on purpose or by mistake – or we can trust the people to discipline themselves. Now, I know that they often don’t. I was really, really shocked when Badger told me that a member of staff at a hotel where church leaders go to stay for conferences, told him that use of telly for pornography rises sharply when that group is in. I don’t know how they can tell, but apparently they can.
But, if you just took the telly away, that wouldn’t quite solve the problem – would it? It seems to me that taking away the telly would just cover it up. If given access to a telly a Christian man would sit up half the night watching porn, then the man has a problem, never mind the telly.
Difference…. Sameness…. Belonging…. Uniformity…. Individuality…. Trust… Self-discipline…. Humility…. Freedom… Travelling along together… All these things interest me very much, and that’s what I’ve been thinking about tonight.
I like Plain Chant, but I think Polyphony is beautiful as well.
When I get lonely, I wander around Plain dress and modest dress websites and blogs, so I can rest my eyes on somebody who looks like me. Sometimes I feel a bit like the prophetess Cassandra of ancient Greek legend, who had a mean old curse on her: she would always tell the truth but nobody would ever believe her. In similar wise, I seem to be afflicted with the longing to dress just like everybody else but feel compelled to dress in a manner that is like nobody else in my circle and locality at all.
Or, almost. I was buying box files in the stationers the other day when the lady serving at the counter asked me in a voice Pregnant With Meaning, “Are you from Robertsbridge?”
Robertsbridge is a Sussex village about twelve miles inland from us. As Hebe, who was with me, said later when we were laughing about the conversation together: “Why? D’you want something taking there?”
No, what the woman meant is that there’s a Plain community there – of ex-Hutterians, and they dress pretty much like me. Or me like them. Or something.
But in general nobody much looks like me – though a Brethren woman passing through Silverhill (where I live) whipped her head round sharpish and gave me a very penetrating look when she spotted me a couple of summers back.
As they so often say to me filing out at the conclusion of a funeral: ‘What are you?’ Good question. What indeed?
Anyway, feeling lonely and a bit cut off from the herd this evening, I was mooching around the usual blogs enjoying looking at other women who dress Plain and reassuring myself I am not mad, when I came across one of the usual discussions about not drawing attention to oneself.
The point being made was that dressing Plain (assuming the woman in question not to actually be Old Order Amish / Mennonite or whatever) was OK so long as you weren’t doing it to draw attention to yourself. I stopped and thought about that for a long time. What kind of woman, I wondered incredulously, would dress like this in order to draw attention to herself? I mean, I know it does – but it’s not the right kind of attention, is it? The kind of attention a woman draws to herself on purpose is to look sexy and slender and elegant and chic and glamorous and successful and all that kind of thing. Well, I think Plain dress is beautiful, in its own funny way, but it’s certainly none of those other things. The attention it draws is the kind where people snigger at you or feel sorry for you, or wonder if you’ve come from a re-enactment venue. People I don’t know say hello to me now I dress Plain: and the people that do are very evidently residents from institutions – I think they simply mistake me for a nurse.
I find it wearing, embarrassing, isolating and very, very difficult. No, I don’t want to draw attention to myself. But in this garb I am myself, I am at peace, my soul sits right in its socket: that’s just how it is.
But then later I got to thinking about the Amish/Hutterite thing about uniformity: the kind of not drawing attention to yourself where you all dress the same because individuality is frowned upon as a temptation to pride and the desire to stand out – drawing attention to oneself.
I thought about (okay, I was ironing by this time, and I always think a lot when I’m ironing) our little troupe – this tribe and its friends and associates. We aren’t exactly a community, but somehow we’re a bit more than a family, because we live our lives ethically and intentionally, and try to make our choices in the light of Christ. In this house, we live simply, and we draw people to learn about the Bible and the way of Jesus, and we try to build the Peaceable Kingdom every day in all the ordinary little decisions and actions that make up a life.
But we don’t have rules about it, and we do not demand uniformity – never have. There’s never been a time when I told my children how to dress or whether they could dye their hair or have piercings or not. I believed in talking things through, teaching by example, and respecting their choices. Seems to have worked.
The thing is, I don’t really think you can get away from individuality and difference. They interviewed some Poor Clare nuns (Franciscans) on telly a few weeks back, and I was struck by how strongly evident was their individuality: dressing all alike made them more individual, not less. Fashion is a uniform just as much as Plain dress is, and dressing Plain makes the personality very vivid, somehow.
I have noticed over several decades acquaintance with (and affection for) Plain people, that Christian groups that have strict rules about adherence to uniformity have to express difference by church splits, because there is no room for difference to be contained within the group.
Every time real difference occurs, there has to be shunning and excommunication, or a whole new church started. This is surely a very expensive and disruptive and stressful way of dealing with difference of opinion. If a man’s entire family have to be severed from their kith and kin because the chap decides it would be a good idea to drive a tractor, I’m not wholly convinced that is altogether constructive: though I do indeed see why agreeing to do without tractors makes a farming community more interdependent and therefore more tight-knit.
If you don’t have the rules you can hold together in love, simply respecting each other’s differences when they crop up – as, people being people, they surely will.
There are casualties to either system, of course. The fewer the rules, the greater the level of self-discipline must be, for the community to hold faithfully to a Christlike life. Without rules, you have to (be able to) trust each other.
For example, I recently read that the Amish call television ‘the sewer in the living room’. Okay. Well, that’s very vivid! But it made me wonder what on earth they thought I might be watching on telly! Last night I saw a programme about the architectural vocabulary of church buildings (how they express the theology of the faith community in bricks and mortar). Straight after that I watched a programme I had been waiting to see, that is going through week by week the unfolding history of one particular ancient village through the ages. Last night we were on the fourteenth century. As I am writing a Christian novel set in the fourteenth century right now, I was keen to see it. ‘The sewer in the living room’? Why?
So, assuming we agree that not all programmes are suitable for Christian people to watch, and there’s an awful lot on the telly it would be better not to see, there are two approaches: either we can make a rule that members of this church may never watch telly in case they watch something sewer-ish on purpose or by mistake – or we can trust the people to discipline themselves. Now, I know that they often don’t. I was really, really shocked when Badger told me that a member of staff at a hotel where church leaders go to stay for conferences, told him that use of telly for pornography rises sharply when that group is in. I don’t know how they can tell, but apparently they can.
But, if you just took the telly away, that wouldn’t quite solve the problem – would it? It seems to me that taking away the telly would just cover it up. If given access to a telly a Christian man would sit up half the night watching porn, then the man has a problem, never mind the telly.
Difference…. Sameness…. Belonging…. Uniformity…. Individuality…. Trust… Self-discipline…. Humility…. Freedom… Travelling along together… All these things interest me very much, and that’s what I’ve been thinking about tonight.
I like Plain Chant, but I think Polyphony is beautiful as well.