When it comes to the weekly Sunday-morning-getting-ready-for-church experience, my children really don’t know how good they have it. If they utter so much as a single deep sigh over having to turn off their cartoons to go to their rooms, get dressed, and fix their hair, I will threaten to tell them, once again, what church attire was like “back in my day.”
I’ve learned that that’s a surefire way to get them to spring from the couch and bound upstairs to find their comb and brush without another word of resistance.
You see, lucky for my son and daughter, we are raising them in a church family that truly embraces the “come as you are” approach to their services. On any given day, attendees come to our church clad in everything from holey blue jeans, T-shirts, and sneakers to the traditional “Sunday best”.
If you peruse the congregation, you’ll see tattooed bikers in their leather Harley jackets with their hands raised in worship, just like the folks sitting beside them who dressed up in their pearls and neckties. From a global perspective, I love that not one single person would ever be made to feel excluded because they are not dressed nicely enough.
From a selfish standpoint, I love that for me, preparing for Sunday service does not have to involve starching little khaki pants and shirts with buttons, both of which have the power to somehow launch a full-blown itch attack on my 7-year-old son before they even touch his body. I don’t have to engage in World War III with my tween daughter over fancy shoes that will undoubtedly give her blisters but are the only ones that match her pretty dress.
When I think about my family’s more casual approach to church attire, I can’t help but reflect on the Sunday get-ups of my childhood, which most certainly never included distressed denim. First, there was the selection of the church clothes which was a real experience in and of itself.
In the days before online shopping, my mother and grandmother would pile my three younger siblings and me into the car to head out for a Saturday of shopping in places that, to a young child, felt a little too much like exactly the H-E-Double-Hockey-Sticks place we were all trying to avoid with all this church-going.
Hours upon hours of enduring the trying on and pulling off of dresses with embarrassingly poofy sleeves, big satin sashes that contrary to what Maria von Trapp sang, were most definitely not one of my favorite things, stiff crinoline linings that might as well have been made of chicken wire, and a million pearl buttons down the back that eliminated the option of comfortably leaning back on the wooden church pew. And the dresses were just the beginning.
Next would come an onslaught of torturous legwear: thin (and yes, itchy … why did everything have to be itchy?) lace tights for springtime that were not optional, even if your knees were skinned raw from a roller skating crash, impossibly thick cable-knit wool stockings in the winter that made your underwear bunch and your feet sweat (you knew you’d better not tear those tights or else), and three-tier ruffled silk-trimmed cuffed socks for the summer months that made your ankles appear as though they were sprouting white carnations.
And then the shoes. Oh! The horrible, oppressive church shoes. Patent leather Mary Janes that perpetually felt too small or too big; never just right, still haunt my nightmares.
As if all of that were not enough, there were various other accoutrements to which we were subjected: slips (does anyone wear slips anymore?); white eyelet bloomers (because even our undergarments had to be fancy on Sunday); hairbows so enormous that our songs and prayers weren’t the only things that reached heavenward on Sunday morning; and miniature purses that matched our dresses and were filled with nothing but enough candy and chewing gum to keep us quiet through the service. (I’m guessing my mom allowed this only because she figured four mouths full of Juicy Fruit couldn’t desperately whisper “I’m so itchy!” in her ear while she tried to focus on the scripture.)
Thirty-some years later, I wonder if, as my faithful mother sat in that sanctuary every Sunday and prayed for her loved ones and for her community, she also worked in a little self-centered prayer of repentance for the thoughts that surely ran through her mind when she looked down the pew and noticed a hole in Claire’s lace tights, a black scuff on Caroline’s brand-new white Easter shoes, a run in Susanna’s satin sash, or a red Kool-Aid stain on baby Clay’s sailor suit.
Needless to say, I am grateful that these days, the four of us can file into 9:30 a.m. service at 9:35 in a slept-through-our-alarms-inspired combination of messy buns, cowlicks, hooded sweatshirts, Walmart flannels, slip-on Crocs, and Nikes, and not one single person will look at us sideways. As a matter of fact, they’ll smile and scoot over on their row to make room. We are welcomed, just as we are.
And as my son loves to remind me in the rare instances that I do suggest he forego ratty high-tops for his nice, new loafers … Jesus wore sandals.
