Collared

The last time I went to the church of my childhood, I wore my collar—my hot, plastic, clerical collar. I felt obvious and tender in it, like a burgeoning zit, like everyone would stare. And yet, I wanted them to stare, I wanted them to look at me and be amazed.

Because there should be nothing odd about it. I am an Episcopal priest, a priest in the denomination of this very church. But there was everything odd about it, because in this particular parish, I would never be allowed to stand at this altar and speak the words of the eucharist, consecrating bread and wine into the elements of holy communion. I wore my collar anyway.

I took my place in a pew, halfway up on the right side, under the soaring oak beams of the nave, and opened a hymnal. Reds and blues from stained-glass windows washed over my hands. Around me, the cream of the community stood—women with blonde pageboys, men in blue blazers and khakis, button downs and rep ties. The procession moved down the aisle behind cross and torches, the choir singing, sopranos, then altos, tenors, basses, a second cross for the altar party, the eucharistic ministers, the deacon, the priests, all men behind that second cross. Still, in the twenty-first century, all men.

It has always been like this, in the church that brought me up. In the 1970s, when I was fourteen, the beloved rector said I could never be an acolyte, because that might give me the mistaken notion that I was called to ordained ministry. And that would be so sad, wouldn’t it? In the 1980s, his successor told my husband and me in premarital counseling that if we decided to keep our own names, it would lead to “separate vacations and probably divorce.”

And yet, here I am, collared and credentialed. Somehow, the wall of masculinity failed to prevent God from breaching the barriers. Somehow, in the music, the prayers, the taste of the wafer dissolving on my tongue, in the very breath of the place, the stillness on a Sunday night after youth group, the candles burning in the dark at the Easter Vigil, somehow, the wall failed to hold. Somehow, God found me anyway. In this place. Regardless of what anyone said.

And so, when I returned to my hometown to visit family, I went to church. I wanted to see if God still floated around in that space, between the banners and the organ pipes, underneath the pew kneelers, creeping in all the cracks of all the walls human beings made to shut the dangerous Spirit out.

It was all there, just as it had always been. The patriarchy and the Holy Spirit, dancing some kind of crazy tango of “no, you can’t,” “but you must.” I still felt it all, just as if I were fourteen again. Even knowing how it all turned out in the end, the intensity of the dance still burned.

I wore my collar to church that day. I wore it as a sign that I belonged, even though I did not belong here. I wore it as a sign that I was acknowledged, even though I could not be acknowledged here. I wore it to say that I am no fantasy. I am real. I am real. I am real.

-Kit Carlson

Kit Carlson is an Episcopal priest and a life-long writer with work appearing in publications as diverse as Seventeen Magazine and Anglican Theological Review. She is a Pushcart Prize nominee, recently published in Ponder Review, Little Patuxent Review, and The Windhover. She is author of "Speaking Our Faith" (Church Publishing, 2018). She lives in East Lansing, Michigan, with her husband Wendell, and Lola, a nervous rescue dog.