Clothes don't really make the man.
30th Sunday C 10/26/19 Sir352Tim4Lk18:9-14 E 4, 10, 12 JMayzik SJ
Have you seen them? They’re everywhere, these pop up Spirit Halloween stores. Like zombies inhabiting dead bodies they have moved into the empty shells of former banks, Duane Reades, Dean and Deluccas. These next few days will be wild for them and their temporary employees. I went into the one a few blocks up on 2nd Avenue a couple of days ago. It was 10:30 in the morning, I was greeted by a witch of some denomination—like Christians they all look alike to me—and she immediately directed me to the adult section of the store. I passed racks of women’s costumes—mermaids, little red riding hood, bat girl and cat girls, fallen angels. The guys section had gangsters, superheros, cops, scary clowns, Indiana Jones, and of course priests. The priest costumes looked pretty fake to me, but who am I to judge? As I was looking at the packages, it suddenly dawned on me that the same guy was modeling the costumes on all the packages. There he was as a pimp, then as a bishop, then as a hunky firefighter, and an astronaut. Who is this guy, I wondered, and what costume does he ordinarily wear? Over the next couple of days, I kept wondering who he was, where he lived, and was he proud of being on the package covers in all those ridiculous outfits?
A couple of days later I took one of my very early morning walks up 5th Avenue. You were all asleep at the moment, as was most of the city. All the way I was passing these models, men and women and children, who were smiling at the empty city in their flashy videos playing in huge storefront windows. They all looked so confident, so self-assured in their Prada outfits, so woke and wonderful, bedecked in their Michael Kors jackets and boots and handbags. The clothes make the man, a seemingly Don Draper Mad Men phrase, but actually it goes back much farther: vestis virum facit, the Latin phrase of Erasmus, a Catholic priest, and theologian from 1508. Clothes give men authority, he said. A hundred years later William Shakespeare agreed in a line from Hamlet: “the apparel oft proclaims the man”. We all at one moment or another subscribe to that, don’t we? When we go into H & M or Macy’s or Marshall’s and pull something off the racks, we’re thinking…vestis virum facit, aren’t we? What will this costume do for me? Will I be loved a bit more, will I be accepted by the people who matter, will it give me an authority that I may not even believe I really have?
What is it about costumes, anyway? Sometimes at Halloween I wonder what they are saying about all of us. It’s such fun to dress up, isn’t it? When I was in the Spirit Halloween store I almost bought a ridiculous-looking wig. And the hunky firefighter outfit seemed to be calling out to me as well.
One of my favorite movies is called King of Hearts. It’s about this town in France during World War I that is abandoned by its citizens because they learn that the Germans have planted a bomb somewhere in the middle of the town. The only people left are the women and men in an insane asylum, who know nothing about the bomb. The asylum gates are left open, and the inmates leave the asylum and take on the roles of the townspeople: one becomes a kind of effeminate barber, another becomes a circus lion tamer, an elegant woman becomes the mayor, several become ladies of the night, an ancient man becomes an altar server to the bishop. As a British soldier desperately tries to help them and find the bomb, they anoint him their King of Hearts. Eventually the British and the German armies have a shoot-out in the middle of the town, and every one of them are killed. The insane patients see it all and voluntarily decide to flee the real world of costumes and murderous war by returning voluntarily to the confines of the insane asylum. The British soldier joins them, fleeing the madness of the real world.
Sometimes when you look around at our world, it is a bit of madness, isn’t it? And we do put on these costumes, don’t we, but sometimes when you get a look at it objectively, we discover that the clothes don’t really make the man, do they?
There’s something of this in the readings today. The clothes certainly do not make the woman or the man in God’s eyes. As a matter of fact, it’s quite the opposite. God “hears the cry of the oppressed…is not deaf to the wail of the orphan, nor to the widow…the prayer of the lowly pierces the clouds”. The oppressed, the orphan, the widow, the lowly, the poor. The despised, hated tax collector who beat his breast and could not even raise his eyes to heaven, crying out ‘be merciful to me, a sinner’. The clothes of the fancy Pharisee do not impress the Lord of all things, the Alpha and the Omega, the King of Kings. Nor do the funny hats of the bishops, the Armani suits of the CEO, the high fashion of a movie star.
The costumes we wear at Halloween are something like the costumes that somebody wears in real life only bigger and more exaggerated, more ridiculous and perhaps--just perhaps--more truthful than life itself. Which makes Halloween such a good thing because, well, sometimes you need a mirror in doorway to see and be seen more truthfully, to see the sadness behind the smiles and the hope in the frowns, the fear in the bravado and the desire in the disinterest, the good in the evil and the evil in the good. Sometimes you need to see yourself walking around in a silly costume to make you understand what I think Jesus is talking about today in the Gospel.
We are, all of us, little kids in costumes in God's eyes, eyes that see things as they really are, eyes that love whatever they see however costumed, and I think that Jesus is telling us to take off our pharisaical costumes in front of one another especially here in God's house of mirrors where, guess what, we are all humbly naked--so that we can laugh together at all our insanity, cry together over all our hatred and violence, love one another in all our nakedness before the God who loves us so much. In this place we have an all saints party, and this is the kind of party where you take off your costume, you see, that's what Christianity is all about, that's what humility is all about, when queens and bums and priests and supergirl and presidents and popes become simply brothers and sisters in the bosom of God who loves us whatever the nature and costume and vanity of our sins. You see, we're all the same in God's eyes--it's our eyes that are the problem. Everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, and everyone who humbles himself will be exalted.
You know that Apple store across from the Plaza hotel? They just reopened it, underneath the glass box in front of the GM building. It’s open all night, you can go down at 4 in the morning like I did and check out the new iPhone Pro or the latest IMac or an Apple watch. Well, I went there at 4am, and I swear I saw the guy in on the costume packages. He looked pretty ordinary. Just like every one of us. No costumes necessary.
