The new monastery door sign

I was thinking about angels, it being the feast of SS Michael, Gabriel and Raphael, and the unwillingness of our generation to admit their power or influence. It is not that angels don't exist, we just don't recognize them nor do we want to. Angels are messengers of God and as such not always welcome. How much easier to deny their existence, close our ears and eyes and live within our own little world, safe from the mystery that is God? It won't wash, of course, God will keep bursting in upon us in unexpected ways. In a sense, you could describe the recent visit of Pope Benedict XVI as an "angelic visitation". He came and spoke to us of God; some opened their hearts to his message, others turned away; but it was the message, not the messenger, that ultimately matters.

The papacy is a sign pointing beyond itself to God and there are many similar signs in the world. One which is frequently argued over is the religious habit. Recently, The Anchoress wrote a thoughtful and deliberately provocative column on the subject which you can find here. The resulting debate is interesting on several counts. Not surprisingly, the majority of those who responded came down on the side of nuns and sisters wearing habits. Equally unsurprisingly, the majority of those wanting nuns and sisters to wear habits appear not to be nuns or sisters themselves but lay men and women. One or two linked not wearing the habit with a lack of faith or prayer, an opinion I would regard as defamatory except that it was probably made without really thinking. Many of the comments effectively proved my own point: that people who are not themselves nuns or sisters feel perfectly entitled to lay down the law about what nuns and sisters should wear, how they should behave and so on and so forth.

Leaving aside the historical/canonical inaccuracies and misunderstandings which are inevitable in such discussions, I was left wondering why it is acceptable to prescribe what religious women should wear while saying little or nothing about religious men. And why should lay people, especially men, presume to tell religious women what to wear? You have only to recall recent discussions about the dress code for Muslim women to see that it is a trifle contradictory. It is no good arguing that one is merely insisting that religious women follow the directives of Rome. Oddly enough, most of us are well-informed about what is required and take care to obey, even when some directives read a little quaintly (you should see what Sponsa Verbi had to say about fax machines at a time when most of us were already using email).

The community here wears a traditional habit and is happy to do so. We are well aware of the sign-value of the monastic habit and can give a good account of it; but it is not the habit which makes us nuns. I cannot help wondering whether there is a little false romanticism in lay enthusiasm for religious dress, a sneaking suspicion that the desire to make sure we act in certain ways, meet standards set for us by those who are not living our way of life (e.g. never angry, never tired, though the Lord Jesus was both), and regarding us as somehow not quite adult, is actually bound up with something few would acknowledge: a desire for vicarious holiness. The truth is, we are not children, nor are we angels in the popular sense. We are something much more glorious: redeemed sinners, signs of the KIngdom, even, sometimes and without our knowing, messengers of God.