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Friday, February 12, 2010

Even Preachers Not In a Purple Dress can Be as Deep as a Wet Spot on the Pavement


Pete Townshend on costumed clergy:

"After watching Mel Gibson's harrowing 2004 film The Passion of the Christ I immediately wrote three songs. ["A Man in a Purple Dress"] was one of them.

It is not so much a rail against the principles of justice through the ages, but a challenge to the vanity of the men who need to put on some kind of ridiculous outfit in order to pass sentence on one of their peers.

It is the idea that men need dress up in order to represent God that appalls me. If I wanted to be as insane as to attempt to represent God I’d just go ahead and do it, I wouldn't dress up like a drag-queen."
-Pete Townshend


Some readers will remember I sold my "grey dress" on EBay.
Story here.

So even though I have sold my goods, and post videos like this..

..I am at all not condemning pastors/priests for wearing clerical attire.
(Though the issue must be addressed...pun intended)
I just can't do it anymore..
(I couldn't even do it when I did it.)

And once must agree that just because some of us dress down, or speak from a stool rather than a pulpit, it doesn't make us more spiritual.
We just look frumpier.
And may well be worse off than that:
..in these egalitarian times, the attitude of spiritual conceit has had to be a a little more creative,and a pastor shows his prowess in humility by asking people to call him "Joe". Behind the scenes, he is a fierce, hard-driving CEO,and reads those CEO magazines, and acts like a CEO on airplanes, right down to ogling the flight attendant in first class. But out in front of the congregation, sitting on that stool, fitted out in a Mr. Rogers cardigan, he is open, transparent,and shares the
struggles of his heart--the struggles of a simple guy...named Joe.

He is about as deep as a wet spot on the pavement.

-Douglas Wilson,
A Serrated Edge: A Brief Defense of Biblical Satire and Trinitarian Skylarking...p. 36

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