There was once this barbaric tradition, here, of Church Folk gathering at a crowded little buffet place after church. This restaurant, Furs, was crowded not because the food was so great (at times it reminded me a high school cafeteria) but because its process were so low. Low enough that the chain vanished from Ourtown a few years back. But, during its heyday, most Church Folk could be found congregating there after Sunday service, services they often groused about going too long, only to then spend hour upon hour gossiping at Fur’s.
In this mix, you could always tell who the pastors were. They were the guys, most often the pot-bellied guys, wearing their hats. These men would get out of their fancy cars, just a s often ungracious, stereotypical Cadillacs and so forth, who would then don top coats and hats for the twenty-foot walk to the restaurant door. Being a guy who’d die naked if they’d let me, I could never understand why these pastors insisted on bringing these heavy coats and gregarious clown-pimp hats into a restaurant only a few feet from their car. It’s not as if these men had to march across the frozen tundra to get there. The wives would, just as often, put on mink and ridiculous gold lame “crown” hats, a quizzical display of prosperous bling considering going to Fur’s on a Sunday usually told the world what a cheapskate you were.
Inside, many of the pastors would remove the heavy coat—which they wore just to show it off—and go through convolutions of finding an empty chair or such they could park their folded armor into before seating themselves—with their gregarious hats on—to eat dinner. Many, to my direct observation, did not even remove their hats when they prayed over the table. It was like a convention of Insecurity Anonymous, these people behaving like ten-year olds in desperate need of external validation. And, I’m not talking ball caps. I’m talking large, gregarious fedoras, some with bands and feathers and such. Pimp hats. Some of these men having removed their top coat and even their suit jacket, rolled up their sleeves, and dug into fried chicken and mashed potatoes while still wearing a large eyesore of a felt Fedora. Those were the pastors.
I suppose its tribal. And maybe somebody can drop me an email in defense of this nuttiness. But, form my chair, gazing across the expanse of the cafeteria, I could get a probable sense of people who knew God and people who didn’t. To know God is to be in touch with something so pure and so fulfilling that there’s really no need to embarrass yourself like that. Here, in Ourtown, the major effort of church resources is for pageantry. Anniversaries and Annual Days. This is what we budget for: the show-off. And I indeed question the spiritual walk of men and women so desperate to be noticed and/or validated that they dress like circus clowns.
I, on the other hand, have a giant head, and thus do not wear hats because hats make my giant head look even gianter. As a matter of preference, I prefer the simple clergy shirt to the loud, fancy suits many pastors seem to gravitate toward. Only, here, in this mirror universe, the clergy shirt is often seen as a sign of vanity. It’s one of those reverse psychology things, the folks so used to the dog food that they accept the loud suits and pimp hats as the norm, and my plain, drab clergy shirt is often viewed as pretentious. I love wearing it. I love what it means. I love what it represents. I love what it reminds me of. In white culture, a man wearing a clerical collar is respected and admired. In our wretched, backward, ignorant fashion, a man wearing a clerical collar is often snickered at and ridiculed, “Who does HE think he is?”
What I like about the collar is not that it make me look important, but that it is simple. It is plain. It is humble. It gets right to the point. It is a simple smock that diverts attention from how fancy your suit and tie are. A pastor friend of mine said he only wears the shirt for special occasions and treats it with a worshipful deference, to which I politely disagree. The clerical shirt is a work shirt. It is designed for everyday use, not to be held in abeyance for special occasions. It is supposed to get dirty, to be used and reused and discarded.
What I like about the shirt is it tells people Whose you are. When I am wearing it, nobody has to guess what I am about. I cannot hide or melt into the crowd the way these pastors in the loud suits can. Nobody mistakes me for a pimp, and I can get away with absolutely nothing because, once someone has seen me wearing the clerical shirt, I have become a marked man. They know I am a minister of the Gospel, and my life, my everyday walk, must now reliably support the simple cloth shirt I wear on Sunday. As the Church Folk snicker at me.
Maybe if I wore a hat.
I've never cared much for academic snobs. Like graduates of 12-step programs, Jehovah's Witnesses and work-out freaks, academic snobs tend to look down their nose on anybody who doesn't have an advanced degree. Well, fact is, most ministers I've encountered who hold advanced degrees can also be dumb as a bag of hammers. No vision, intellectually lazy, ignorant. Invested in their title, hitting people over the head with their doctorate, with their ThM. But no work. None. These men display absolutely none of the qualities of God, the fruit of the spirit. They are petty, jealous, haters. The scornful of Psalms 1. I'm thinking of one pastor in Appalachian territory who ministers to thousands and yet whose vision statement reads like a child's nursery rhyme, completely nonsensical and completely vacant of even reasonable doctrinal foundation. So, far be it from me to lord it over the Hat Police here in Ourtown, as barnyard country-ism is part of the black church's DNA and hardly exclusive to this city. But the disconnect between what these men claim to be, this nonsense with titles, and how these men conduct themselves is so vast and so wide that it makes me stop and wonder if these men truly know Christ, or if they've settled for simply being part of the fraternity of the ignorant. I mean, in every situation, I try and imagine Christ behaving this or that way, sitting there gossiping in shirt sleeves and a gregarious felt hat. Look, if you actually know Christ, some of His love would show through you. if you don't actually know Him, at least read a book—say, the bible—and learn how to fake it better. And, on the off-chance your drill sergeant or your mama never taught you (and I'd find that hard to believe): gentlemen, take off your hat when you're indoors. You want to stand out among your peers, try doing the actual work of a pastor. That seems to be increasingly rare these days.
