“The Spirit Said “Cover Your Head” and I Said “Crap””, plus Other Stories From The Lived Theology Frontlines
…any woman who prays or prophesies with her head unveiled dishonors her head… — 1 Corinthians 5:11a
“When Spirit says do, do” is a pop culture phrase seminary uses to get you out of your comfort zone, to move you into a new ways of being. Spirit says do an awful lot, but for every time it does, the world says “LOL, no” just as often. We can’t ignore one to serve the other and you can’t ignore the other and serve the one. In other words, paradox, and if any word is more closely related to seminary than paradox, it has to be financial.
Scripture, though, gives us a tool, specifically this verse from Matthew 19:24: “…it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of G-d.” We are rich in the world and we are something about a camel and oh good G-d that was terrible. Let’s try that again?
Spirit says do, world says no, paradox. What do we do now? Solve the paradox. Find, through prayer, reflection, study, and community the narrow way between the two chasms of unquestioned acceptance and relentless rejection. That is, despite all the fancy words ever produced, or at least should be, the whole of religious practice. Find the middle way. Seek the path of G-d.
I recently failed a seven-day trial where I covered my hair outside of the home, only revealing it for my spouse at the end of the day and before we went to bed. I said failed not because I didn’t cover for all seven days, quite the opposite. I failed my seven-day test because I still haven’t stopped covering. I started and never stopped, because once I started with intentionality, it was quite clearly Correct. Spirit said do, the world said no, and I found the middle way that works for me. Let’s talk about the middle way.
There were some heated conversations in my social circles over the 2017 World Hijab Day. There were expressions of concern over appropriation, over normalization of oppression, and over signs of solidarity. Some progressive activist folks in my circles demanded that all non-Muslim women wear a hijab on World Hijab Day. The irony of liberationist-minded activists demanding compliance to a voluntary act to support folks who have to do that same because of an oppressive government is one of the most ironic things I think I have ever heard. Go ahead, bask in that delicious, delicious irony, I am.
A note on hijab: Hijab is the contemporary word for the headscarf used to cover the hair, neck, and ears as part of the Islamic modesty proscription, laid out in the Holy Quran (Surah 24:31 being the clearest regarding the wearing of khimar, contemporized to hijab).
I began to research what wearing hijab means for those who do, and perhaps more importantly, what wearing hijab means for those who do not. Hijab is complicated because, at least here in 2020 America, we are not a friendly people to those who look and act differently than the dominant white suburban psuedo-Evangelical culture. Brown skin, Muslim identity, and a headscarf is pretty much a guarantee for harassment at the hands of some white-skinned knee-sock wearing MAGA-hat fool. We’ll get into the justice aspects of this dynamic as lived theology a bit further down in the article.
Many white people in the United States see countries, especially in the Middle East, with dress codes as representative of all Muslims in the entire world period bar none and something to be feared. The real issue most folks seem to have with hijab and religiously proscribed modesty clothing of other Abrahamic faiths is simply good old-fashioned homegrown whitebread racism. Our Sikh and Orthodox friends would likely agree.
Back to Spirit. Spirit said cover my hair, the world said no, and I said find the middle way. I didn’t know what I didn’t know, and to a Ravenclaw, this is the highest form of unacceptibility. I knew I had multiple types of bias coming into this search for the middle way, and it was a requirement to interrogate my bias as ruthlessly as I interrogated my own ignorance.
The more I interrogated my bias and my ignorance, the more questions arose. My theologies changed, deepening into their already well-formed channels. They grew tributaries, finding each other in the backwaters of my sleeping mind. For every answer, there were ten more questions. It was maddening.
I am grateful to my spouse in all this, even if they didn’t necessarily know I was eyeball-deep in this research (to be fair, it was three years of off-and-on research, not just three straight years of This One Thing. That they would have noticed, trust me.)
My spouse is a member of the Baha’i Faith, and from them I have learned the power of progressive revelation. Gnosis is not a sealed vessel, not at all, and our lady Sophia reveals Herself to the willing. Wisdom and knowledge do not exist in a vacuum, for as we witness their mutable forms, we have an obligation to the wisdom that flows from it.
Speaking of Wisdom, Paul the “Apostle”, also known as noted misogynst and anti-Semite Saul of Tarsus, wrote to the congregation in Corinthians two letters. We do not have the letters from the church to him, nor do we have at least one more of his letters to the Corinthians. Nevertheless, the first letter to the Corinthians contains some remarkable language, including that infamous section in chapter 11 on complementarianism.
My feminist rejection of Christianity long taught me that complementarianism is the work of the Enemy, if the such a creature existed in a fine world of reason, rationality, logic, and justice. My seminary education, on the other hand, was teaching me that the rejection of the whole because of trauma and anger is the path of ministerial destruction. One should process the uncomfortable as a spiritual practice, and process the dangerous and painful as therapy. Keep the good and true, discard the bad and false. Weigh the scales, find the middle way. Somewhere in the sifting pan lies the gold.
I was reading 1 Corinthians 11 for a class when Spirit said do. Specifically, Spirit made the connection abundantly clear for me that, while the entirety of the chapter is used for evil, the one bit my feminist self could not disagree with was the “covering of the head” in verse 5. There is something true about being under a cover in prayer or while preaching, something hard to describe except as the audible click when something falls into the right slot. So I did what any good, self-respecting Ravenclaw would do and started researching the dust out of the thing to find a way out of doing the thing.
I was not successful. Spirit is persistent. Spirit is annoying.
Many of my feminist siblings and cousins are empowered by sex-positive displays of bodily love. My feminist self is empowered by their empowerment of those things. Those are things that are just, well, not and never were for me. I am proud of my body as often as I am not, scars and all. I am happy to be naked with those I love, but in public, outside of the house, I am not. I prefer long sleeves, long pants, long skirts. I like my clothing to fit, and fit properly, mind you, but I do not need that fit to be super revealing, super tight, or particularly “sex-positive”. For me, clothing is about who I choose to be revealing myself to and that is my loved ones, not the public.
Before and since open-heart surgery in January 2019, I have used hiking buffs to cover and control my hair. Not every day, but many. This is what kept bringing me back to Paul, the Quran, the Hebrew Scriptures, and all the questions — who do my choices put me in relationship with? Am I in relationship with my choices? Who is Spirit moving me closer to? Am I going deeper into the channel of my own faith, or am I scared of drowning in shallow water? Important questions. I knew I was grappling with something large, even if I couldn’t tell what it was beyond a snake, a tree, and a wall. I found my answer in, of all things, Julien of Norwich’s Revelations of Divine Love:
Truth sees God, and wisdom contemplates God, and from these two comes a third, a holy and wonderful delight in God, who is love.
Truth, aka Spirit, had witnessed G-d and told Sophia, the place of progressive revelation in which my soul contemplates G-d, a message. Spirit had said, “Cover your head”. The message was true. The only question left was how.
I researched hijabs. I researched Christian headcoverings. I researched Jewish headcoverings. I researched religious headcoverings in so many world religions that I lost track of which ones I hadn’t looked at yet. I gave an impromptu lecture on the effect of secularization on institutionalized religious clothing and its link to liberation movements to our cats. I kept at it because, if I was going to start this practice, the one thing I did not want to do was claim someone else’s symbol or inadvertently advertise myself as something I am not. I’m not going to be the hypocrite who calls out cultural appropriation in the pulpit while engaging in it in my dailyness.
As luck would have it (or Spirit, as They probably got tired of my dilly-dallying around), it snowed. We were leaving to run errands and my hat was MIA, so I ended up wrapping a scarf around my head. It was an amazing day. I felt great, connected, present. I understood my relationship to G-d to be one of transparent reservation, that what was now hidden from the world was not to G-d. We got back home, I let my hair out, and the lightbulb went off.
I talked to my spouse about doing a seven day trial, see what happens. They said they would miss seeing my curls in the world but liked that this meant said curls were only for them. I forget what day we are on now of that trial, something like eleven or twelve. You know Truth when it smacks you in the head with itself, and this is no exception.
I won’t always get it right and this is okay, nor do I have be a Muslim. The Jesus-followers were using Jewish codes specifying modesty for centuries before the prophet Muhammed (pbuh) received his revelations from Allah (s). One does not have to be a Muslim to wear hijab — or, at least, so say a lot of people I have grown to implicitly trust in this process. What matters is your heart, your faith, and your intent to honor G-d.
Side note for my Unitarian Universalist friends: While we may pull Wisdom from Islam, we do not have the right to cherry-pick Islam. Each bit of Wisdom gleaned, regardless of whichever Source, must be compared against the totality of the whole to ensure that cultural appropriation, cultural misappropriation, bad ethics, harmful theologies, and extra-coventantal behavior does not damage relations. That’s what the “and responsible” bit means in the Fourth Principle.
In the end, whatever the cover, all that matters is that I am acting with right intention, with G-d in my heart, being respectful to what these choices mean to me and others.
I will get questions, comments, looks, and perhaps other, less desirable things. This is the way. My answers to those questions and challenges are in these five foundational, theological statement, distilled from my research, discernment, and processing:
- I cover my head and dress modestly to serve both my own comfort and my relationship with G-d. This is in keeping with the tradition of all the Abrahamic faiths, two of which are part of my individual theological composition.
- I cover my head because I know this action to be one of Truth. While the search for truth and meaning is free, it is also responsible, in that we do not turn away from the uncomfortable and/or unexpected Truths we discover along the way.
- I cover my head because it is, fundamentally, my choice to do so. In that choice, I am in solidarity with many of my Christian and Muslim siblings around the world. One God, Many Names.
- I cover my head because then I get to be confident in pretty fabrics. No really — and this is important — my body is an amazing instrument, placed into humble service to humanity. Dressing modestly and covering my head doesn’t mean dressing plainly, but it does mean I get to feel as beautiful as I am comfortable. Comfort + Beauty = fuel for focusing on sacred service.
- I cover my head as a reminder to live my ethics and my morals. This is, ultimately, an act of covenant between the Holy-As-I-Understand-It and me, and covenant requires right action, and right action requires right ethics.
My truth, my decision, my relationship with G-d. Simple as that. I didn’t always do a perfect job during my seven-day trial run. There were days when the effort I put into it was one small step away from wrapping a shower towel around my head with a belt. Those days are just as important as the perfect days because those were all days I followed through with my decision and my commitment. They were still days when I let faith move me forward down the path.
Putting on the headscarf each of those days was a physical reminder of the need to keep my heart centered on Truth. I remembered who I was called to be in the world, and it changed who I was. Covering my head is not so much about doing something for G-d as it is about creating space for G-d to do something to me.
Mashallah. Selah.
