Now, what you've all been waiting for...part 2 from Susan:
First, please allow me to
apologize for not getting this finished in a more timely manner. I
trust that the few women who are so gracious as to read this will
understand what I mean when I say, “It been crazy around here.”
I also hope that the extra time I’ve had to ponder all things head
covering will make this post worth the wait.
Before I go on, I want you
to understand that I am not trying to encourage or discourage any
type of head covering. There is plenty of information on that
already available. What I do hope to do is share something of the
story of how my journey through various head covering experiences
mirrors my journey into the Catholic Church.
I think it all began with
the old movies I sometimes saw as a child. In these movies, usually
set in the days before Vatican II, the women wearing mantillas was as
much a symbol of being in a Catholic Church as priests, nuns or
stained glass windows. But to my little Baptist eyes, the lace
scarves that those ladies and even little girls wore symbolized
something much greater. It symbolized holiness and a sort of hushed
devotion to God that I just didn’t see around me in Protestant
circles.
Later, around the time I
graduated from high school, hats came back into fashion and I was
content. However, while the fashion passed, my interest in mantillas
did not. In fact, it grew to that point that, when our family moved
to Maryland, I made the comment to James that I would love to find a
church where the women wore some sort of head covering during the
(Presbyterian) worship service. When we visited the first church of
our list, I was delighted to see doilies springing up around the
auditorium like mushrooms.
Over the next few years I
often spoke with the pastor, and even more often with his wife, about
how central wearing something on one’s head was to a woman’s
proper worship. In fact, the hand full of women who wore doilies on
Sunday were part of a sort of inner circle that also home-schooled,
hosted people for Sunday dinners and even lived together in a certain
neighborhood. They had large, but not too large families, never
traveled on Sundays and would not think of making any decision
without consulting the pastor, who was seen as the ultimate authority
on all things spiritual and temporal.
When we eventually found
ourselves on the wrong side of the pastor’s opinion, we had to
leave. In doing so, we lost all our friends and most of our
acquaintances. I also lost, briefly, my desired to wear a head
covering, as I had come closely associate it with feeling superior
and showing the church which clique I belonged to.
Fortunately, God in his
mercy led us to an Anglican Catholic parish where the priest loved us
back into feeling safe in God’s house. I soon discovered that,
while some women did wear doilies and others didn’t, it wasn’t a
big deal. No one cared, except of course the woman who made it her
mission in life to care about every little detail in the church from
the style of cassocks to the height of the candles. I soon figured
out that she was the authority in this church and began to work very
hard to keep in her good graces.
By this time I was also
thoroughly immersed in the Internet and began to come across more and
more information on women covering their heads during worship. In
fact, it became almost an obsession for me as
I read first one
author, then another, then another. But the problem was that the
more I read, the more confused I became, and the more it seemed that
it was ultimately anyone’s guess. Eventually, I realized that the
same was true for most of what I had learned in my life as a
Protestant.
Well, the priest that we
loved left and with him much most of the life of that little church.
We knew we needed to make a change, and began to consider going to
Rome. However, I still had reservations on certain practices and
doctrines—you know, Mary, the Eucharist, all the usual suspects for
a cradle Protestant. Then one day I was watching EWTN and I heard
something that would change my life. When Christ left the earth and
gave the Great Commission to the 11 Apostles, it wasn’t just about
evangelism, though obviously that was a big part of it. It was also
about authority. He had actually left someone in charge and
laid out how they would continue to perpetuate his teachings on
earth.
I was thrilled and
astounded! Did this really mean that I could stop changing my mind
every time I read something new on the Internet? Could I really
stop trying to figure everything out on my own and rely on the
collective wisdom of 2000 years? I mean, that would really leave me
a lot more time for crocheting and maybe even praying. And if this
applied to head covering (which, by the way, the Church teaches is
optional), what else might it apply to? Capital punishment?
Contraception? Ministering to the poor? Yes, yes and yes.
So
that is my story of how a little Baptist girl who was enchanted by
lace scarves became a grown woman finally resting in the bosom of
knowing that she doesn’t have to figure it all out herself.
