'I struck the board, and cried, "No more!" ...'

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Comments

  • ZappaZappa Ecclesiantics Host
    Diocesan culture thing? Very much so, I suspect. Clerical collars are fairly rare in this diocese or even this country.
  • PDRPDR Shipmate
    edited February 2020
    This diocese it is a case of try and find them in a clerical collar during the week - not a hope. Clergy meetings they are all done up to the nines in their beetle suits - especially the ones who do nothing! Those of us who wear clericals fairly regular usually affect the dilapidated schoolmaster look of baggy trousers, aging tweed jacket, and suspicious looking pullover not quite hiding collar and stock. Heaven only knows how that sartorial disaster has held on into 2020s, but it has.
  • CyprianCyprian Shipmate
    ECraigR wrote: »
    As a young adult, I’ve never come across anyone my age who doesn’t recognize a clerical collar. Popular culture, in America, is sufficiently awash in Roman Catholicism that I think many may not know that non RC priests wear them...

    Thank you for giving experience-based confirmation to a suspicion that I have had for a while.

    In online discussions about Orthodox clerical attire, the subject of the collar often comes up. There are all sorts of reasons why people oppose this but one that has never rung true for me is "They look like Catholics", and I have only ever seen that objection come from American contributors to the conversations.

    Here. a clerical collar is just that. Clergy of all stripes wear them, and there is no specific Roman Catholic association.

    That leads me to my own practice, which has been a challenge to work out, and I still haven't settled on anything definite.

    I was formed in Orthodoxy in the ROCOR diocese of Great Britain and Ireland, where clergy wear cassocks in church, when on church business, when among the faithful for any sort of gathering, and often outside of those circles as well. At the time, I was only in minor orders, but the expectation was definitely that I, as a reader and then a subdeacon, was to wear my cassock at least when in church or among the faithful in any capacity. (The one exception was a priest who had spent many years in the Western European Diocese - before the two dioceses were combined - and only wore a cassock for services).

    I was ordained as a deacon only last year, but in an Orthodox church centred in France - a country which seems much more reserved about religious attire in public. The general practice of the communities of our jurisdiction in France is very much relaxed about these things. The cassock is always worn in church but is often taken off straight after the service, and for the shared meal that follows and when out and about in public, when priests often just wear a discreet pectoral cross over a regular shirt or even a t-shirt, even in a monastic setting. This is unusual to me but I recognise it is a different place and "When in Rome, &c."

    As the only clergyman of our jurisdiction in the UK, this creates a tension between the general practice of my church and the expectations of the culture in which I live and minister. People in the UK recognise a collar as denoting clergy. They also recognise a cassock to some extent, (although being dark skinned with facial hair, and walking about in a long black robe often gets me mistaken for belonging to a different faith). To add to the mix of considerations, I have full-time secular employment.

    For the time being, I wear my cassock when on church business: services, going to and from church, meetings, meetings, inter-church gatherings, visiting other churches, and so forth. I concur that it opens doors in hospitals. (I have also noticed that medical staff can be a little more forthcoming about patients' conditions than they might otherwise be.) When out and about generally, I wear a clerical collar, usually with a polo shirt. I arrive at and leave work with the collar but it usually comes off during my shift. If I have to work on a Saturday, I'll be going straight to Vespers from work, so I wear my cassock at work - everyone there knows what I am and what I do, and some interesting conversations arise from it. On days when I just need to have a bit of me-time, I wear a jumper or t-shirt. Is that hiding? Maybe, but I need to recharge sometimes. People who regularly interact with me still know what I am but it just draws a little less attention at those times when I need that,
  • It is an American thing IMHO (possibly elsewhere, but I wouldn't know). It has gotten me and my husband in trouble on numerous occasions, starting with him kissing me goodbye on the steps of an RC University in his clerical collar (while my students watched!) and going on to the time he walked into an RC hospital with two women in labor,* one on either arm and him in his collar. He didn't realize how the nurses were taking it till one said, "Do you want to come see your baby being born, Father?"

    * Serious note: jobs open to refugees here are sometimes so shitty that the husbands couldn't get the time off from their jobs to take their wives in labor into the hospital.
  • That made me smile, LC :smile:
    PDR wrote: »
    This diocese it is a case of try and find them in a clerical collar during the week - not a hope. Clergy meetings they are all done up to the nines in their beetle suits - especially the ones who do nothing!

    I once had a particularly useless academic colleague who used to do the same thing with a book on Maxwell's Equations :)
  • CyprianCyprian Shipmate
    PDR wrote: »
    ...done up to the nines in their beetle suits...

    What's one of those? A Google image search for "beetle suit" just produces pictures of superhero outfits, which I assume is not what you mean.
  • Cyprian wrote: »
    PDR wrote: »
    ...done up to the nines in their beetle suits...

    What's one of those? A Google image search for "beetle suit" just produces pictures of superhero outfits, which I assume is not what you mean.

    ROTFL Lovely mental image!
  • PDRPDR Shipmate
    edited March 2020
    There is a type of ever so slightly shiny black suit that seems to still be sold to clergymen, which, for fairly obvious reasons, gets called 'a beetle suit.' Couple it with a black tab collar shirt, black socks and polished black shoes and one has a clergyman who looks somewhat like an ecclesiastical beetle. I am still surprised when clergy who I know to be quite Low Church in their preferences dress like RC clergy of a generation or so ago. I guess the conventions are a little different here in the USA.
  • ZappaZappa Ecclesiantics Host
    That made me smile, LC :smile:
    PDR wrote: »
    This diocese it is a case of try and find them in a clerical collar during the week - not a hope. Clergy meetings they are all done up to the nines in their beetle suits - especially the ones who do nothing!

    I once had a particularly useless academic colleague who used to do the same thing with a book on Maxwell's Equations :)

    Funnily enough I would never wear clerical garb to a clergy meeting. I understand it as being a sign to the community, which is hardly necessary if the gathering are all identifiable to one another.

    I was in a diocese in OZ in which a rule stated "clergy to wear clericals to synod." I disobeyed habitually. In the two decades since I suspect that standing order has been dropped. As we never voted in houses (except when we were formed as an electoral college, at which point I did wear the collar) I saw the collar as a mark of disunity, rather than the unity in the Body of Christ.

    In the end the bishop bought me a clerical shirt. Which was bloody pointless as I owned three, but I never told him that. And still did not wear it to synod.

    I hate synod at the best of times. Buggered if I was going to wear a strangulation device even more effective as an asphyxiation tool than the bloody interminable speeches.
  • Lamb ChoppedLamb Chopped Shipmate
    edited March 2020
    That made me smile, LC :smile:

    I'll see if I can do it again. There was the time Mr Lamb turned up to church with the plastic tab once again inexplicably missing (I swear, he lost them more often than his glasses). There was nothing to do but cut a tab-shaped bit out of a white plastic disposable cup from the local diner. Which would have been fine, except he put it in wrong-side-round and ended up with their logo centered directly under his chin...

  • Was it the Icon of St. Arbuck?
  • Nope, Steak n Shake, actually. :lol:
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