The Cowardly Lion

I wore my collar all the way home from church on Sunday.

I was nervous. I was paranoid. I was a little brave, to me.

Gasp!! "What is so special about this?" You might say. "Did something traumatic happen?"

No, it is not special, no nothing traumatic happened. I was just not such a coward as usual.

You see, I normally take the little plastic collar part of my clerical shirt that identifies me as a pastor off either before leaving the church building on Sundays, or when I'm partially down the road. I am scared to wear it in public. (That was me, in the back row, breast pleats and all...)

I have yes, worn my collar in public before. During my chaplaincy summer, my friend and I made sure to wear our collars in public for a week. We even went to Target. All to conquer or learn from our fear of the pastoral collar.

So, while I have been wearing my clerical collar on Sundays and at all 'official' type gatherings, I tend not to wear it in public. I'm a wuss.

In the States, when you wear a clerical collar in public people either stare at you (for a long time), stop to talk with you, sometimes confessing all that is wrong with their life, or look away quickly, as if I wield some sort of sin detection laser beam. But here in Norway, no one even looked twice. It was so strange. Maybe people couldn't identify the clerical collar. Maybe people didn't care. Maybe I am paranoid. But it was strange to me.

The one difference I noticed is quite subtle, so maybe it wasn't really true. But, usually Norwegians won't really look at you in the street. Instead, they seem to look at you in appraisal, checking what you are wearing, doing the summary glance. But on Sunday, people just seemed to move casually by. I think I was just paranoid though.

We'll see. Now that its nice out and I can't cover the collar with a scarf, I'm going to try to be brave and wear my collar at least to and from worship on Sunday morning. If nothing else, maybe it will remind people that communal worship occurs every Sunday morning, not just on Christmas and Easter.

Your friend the cowardly lion.