Body language

Christian Century, Jan 16, 2002 by Stephanie Paulsell

I did wear that dress. I wore it and wept in it, and cried out Why? to God in it. I let the prayers in that dress pray for me when my mouth was dry and full of ashes. And when I became pregnant again, I continued to wear that dress. Kay loves long, loose clothes, and her dress was spacious enough to accompany me nearly to the end of my ninth month. Her prayers were spacious enough, too, to gather up my fear and grief and anger. And my joy, when it came.

I was naked in my grief, and my friend clothed me. Clothing others is a Christian obligation, to be cultivated in every area of our lives. No one must be left naked. I was fortunate enough to participate in a seminar a few years ago that was led by the Mennonite educator Shirley Hershey Showalter. We had gathered to think together about the relationship between our religious lives and our lives as teachers and scholars. Shirley laid out a rich feast of texts for us to consider. But she insisted that we ourselves be the most primary of those texts. Each of us was invited to offer a ten-minute spiritual-intellectual autobiography so that we would understand how each other's questions and passions had been forged and fired. Shirley was very strict about those ten minutes--she set an alarm clock to tell us when our time was up--but she always allowed ample time for the group to respond to each autobiographical reflection. "We will leave no one standing naked," she insisted. "Everyone who makes herself or himself vulnerable, we will clothe."

WHEN YOU CLOTHE those who are naked and unprotected, Jesus said, you clothe me. "If a brother or sister is naked and lacks daily food, and one of you says to them, `Go in peace; keep warm and eat your fill,' and yet you do not supply their bodily needs, what is the good of that?" (James 2: 15, 16). These teachings refer, of course, not to spiritual or psychological nakedness but to literal nakedness--nakedness that is unprotected from cold or heat, rain or wind, or from the gaze of others. The practice of honoring the body includes the clothing of those in need.

The New York Times recently reported that "castoff clothes have become the flotsam of turn-of-the-century affluence. Americans bought 17.2 billion articles of clothing in 1998 ... and gave [to] the Salvation Army alone several hundred million pieces, well over 100,000 tons." Many of these clothes come to the Salvation Army stained or otherwise beyond repair; these are shredded, bundled into bales and sold to rag dealers. "Clothes--" said one woman interviewed as she shopped, "I go through them like water."

Many of us go through our clothes like water adding more and more to our overflowing closets as seasons and fashions change. If you're like me, a portion of those 17.2 billion articles of clothing are hanging askew in your closet or stuffed into the back of your bureau, unworn. My friend Kay has two rules about her clothes. The first is, if it goes unworn for six months it is taken out, cleaned, pressed and given away. And the second is like it: when a new article of clothing is purchased, some other article of clothing is donated to someone who needs it. Nothing new comes in without something else going out. In this way, Kay never thinks of any piece of clothing as belonging to herself alone; every shirt, every dress, every coat is destined for someone else. And so she cares for her clothes with that someone else in mind. She keeps them clean, she keeps the buttons tightly fastened, she keeps the zippers repaired, so that when the time comes to give them away, they are in beautiful shape for someone else to enjoy.