October 06, 2009
Disheveled
Have you noticed clothing advertisements for teens and young adults lately? The jeans and t-shirts look like they’ve been piled on the floor, picked up and given half a shake and then photographed. In his day, Peter was concerned that the wearing of gold jewelry and fine clothes might obscure the beauty of the inner self. Not so today. Now we just have to look past the rumpled clothes-basket look in search of that ‘unfading beauty of a gentle and quiet spirit...’ (1 Peter 3:3-4)
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Gail;
-----One of my clients once told me he would not consider hiring a guy who didn’t know what size of pants to buy, or how to put his hat on forward. The baggy pants and backward ball caps worked their purpose of walling him out of their association. Char’s oldest daughter had three friends at our house one afternoon when I got home from work. They were clad in the baggy pants, but each was wearing his cap right. One of them was short, really short. He wore the bill of his cap down so far he could only see the ground in front of him, so no one could see his face. As Natasha introduced me to him, I bent over and looked up into his face, giving him a big smile and waving at him. His two friends thought that was pretty funny, and although I never saw him again, I was able to get acquainted with them. I stepped across their cultural barrier with one good hearted gesture.
-----And I found right what I knew I would. Inside these strange clothes were people with securities and insecurities the same as the rest of us. Clothing has always been the first unspoken statement a person makes to others. To some the statement is, “I don’t fit with you and you don’t fit with me.” But to others it is a statement of fit with certain attitudes and values. Even so, any culture is only a sub-culture of a broader culture. This enables a broader fit. Take your example of the rumpled clothes-basket look. Although these clothes may look more ready to go on to mildewing rather than going onto Mildred, they are still jeans and T-shirts like you and I wear. Step into the Middle-East, however, and you see a lot of towel-heads wrapped up in robes. Outside of the stark difference wearing an almost uniform clothing of a very staunch religious attitude has from our casual knock-arounds, the Middle-Easterner and we both share the cultural trait of wearing clothing, whereas those of the nudist colony don’t. Yet everyone, even the nudist, laughs, cries, eats, loves, competes, etc., all traits of the human culture in general. There is always a doorway through cultural barriers and over their subtler lines. Across these one will find an individual with particular subjects that make him laugh, cry, love, compete, or get hungry.
-----So it is not the crumply clothes, baggy clothes, or hangy robes that bothers me, nor is it whatever makes another laugh, cry, love, compete, or hunger. It is not even that people feel more secure around others more like themselves than not. What bothers me is the worship of the fit, the need to be of a group and have that group’s mentality. Rousseau said that the mass with its general will is the significance, the individual is weak and expendable. Indeed, to him, the individual who does not take part in the general will is the enemy, and the government of the mass is obligated to destroy him. This is simply a flaw of the human character extrapolated to its furthest end, an end Satan will exploit near his end. And although Jesus Christ is the eternal solution to this flaw, for now, in this temporarily flawed existence, we must each find the inevitable doorways across these silly cultural barriers and bow down a bit to the neighbor beside us so we can look him in the face with a smiley, waving howdy. Love feels the feelings and considers the aspirations of individuals without casting them aside simply for what they appear to be. Love makes room for differences without letting its guard down to knowable dangers. And maintaining the cultural trait of love for the individuals crossing your paths both erodes Satan’s effort to elevate a unified humanity to the error of worshipping him, and affords a possible line of communication to convince another to worship the One who will benefit him for eternity.
Love you all,
Steve Corey
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