God Wasn't Wearing Pants Either

Reflections from The Turtle’s Diary*

I spend a fair amount of time looking at people who died hundreds of years ago.

That sounds stranger than I intended.

What I mean is that I'm Greek Orthodox. Every time I attend church, I'm surrounded by icons. Saints cover the walls. Saints stare down from the ceiling. Saints stand in alcoves. Saints seem to be everywhere except helping with the coffee hour afterward.

And every one of them is dressed, not just dressed, but dressed very specifically. Long robes. Heavy garments. Layers upon layers of fabric. And shoes that often look suspiciously like medieval ballet slippers.

After a while, you start to notice a pattern.

No matter when they lived, where they lived, or what they actually wore during their lifetimes, many of them end up looking like they shopped at the same Byzantine department store.

Which occasionally leads me to wonder:

If tank tops and cargo shorts had existed in the fourth century, would Saint Nicholas be wearing them in the narthex today?

If miniskirts had been fashionable in Constantinople, would they appear in the icons?

If blue jeans had existed in ancient Judea, would generations of artists have painted Christ delivering the Sermon on the Mount in Levi's?

I ask these questions only half-jokingly.

Because beneath the humor is something I've always found fascinating.

We often mistake historical clothing for spiritual significance. The robe becomes holy. The sandal becomes holy. The head covering becomes holy. The fashion of a particular century slowly transforms into something timeless simply because it appears in enough paintings.

Yet clothing styles change constantly. Hemlines rise and fall. Sleeves appear and disappear. Buttons come into fashion and then vanish again. Entire industries are built around convincing us that what looked ridiculous ten years ago suddenly looks sophisticated today.

The saints, meanwhile, remain exactly the same.

Which raises a question I've never heard addressed in a sermon.

How much of what we think of as religious modesty is actually just ancient fashion that survived long enough to earn respectability?

That's one of the reasons I find the icons so fascinating. They don't merely tell us what people believed. They also reveal what a particular culture thought holiness should look like.

The saints wear robes because robes looked appropriate to the people painting them. The sandals look appropriate because somebody, somewhere, decided that was what dignity looked like. Over time, the clothing became so familiar that it stopped looking like fashion and started looking timeless.

The strange thing is that this happens everywhere. A custom survives long enough and we stop seeing it as a custom. We start seeing it as the natural order of things. The original reason disappears. The expectation remains.

That's probably why I occasionally find myself staring at an icon and wondering how different it would look if the artist had been born in another century. Would Saint Peter still be wearing robes? Would Saint Nicholas be standing there in cargo shorts? Would some future generation look back at photographs of us and conclude that polo shirts and sensible loafers were outward signs of virtue?

Maybe that's the part that makes me smile.

Not because the icons are wrong. Not because the traditions are meaningless. But because human beings have always been remarkably good at attaching moral importance to things that began as practical decisions, cultural preferences, or ordinary habits.

After all, before there were robes, vestments, sandals, collars, hats, head coverings, neckties, dress codes, and arguments about what was or wasn't appropriate, there was God.

And God wasn't wearing pants.

At least, not that anybody bothered to mention.

That doesn't mean clothing is unimportant. It doesn't mean traditions are meaningless. It certainly doesn't mean every custom should be discarded simply because it's old. Traditions connect us to the people who came before us. They remind us where we've been. They often carry wisdom that survives long after the original reason has faded.

But every now and then I think it's worth asking whether we've confused custom with truth.

Spending decades around naturists has probably made me more aware of that distinction. One of the first things I learned was that many of the assumptions people make from a distance rarely survive actual experience. The stereotypes are usually louder than the reality. People arrive expecting one thing and discover something far more ordinary.

What struck me over the years was how often reality ignored the assumptions. I've met thoughtful people and foolish people, generous people and selfish people, honest people and complete pains in the ass people. Some wore three-piece suits. Some wore bathing suits. Some wore nothing at all.

The clothing never seemed particularly helpful as a character reference.

That realization followed me far beyond naturism. The older I get, the less interested I am in appearances and the more interested I am in conduct. A wardrobe can tell me something about a culture, a profession, a generation, or a fashion trend. It tells me remarkably little about whether someone is kind, trustworthy, patient, or worth sharing a table with.

The older I get, the more suspicious I become of rules that nobody remembers creating, especially the ones everybody insists are obvious. What one generation treats as self-evident often leaves the next generation scratching its head and wondering what all the fuss was about.

Maybe that's one reason I've never been particularly troubled by social nudity. Once you've spent enough time realizing how much of what we call "proper" is simply inherited fashion, it becomes difficult to treat every cultural expectation as though it were a commandment.

That doesn't make clothing bad. It doesn't make nudity good. It simply means that character has always been carrying a heavier burden than wardrobe.

I still sit beneath those icons every week.

The robes are still there.

The sandals are still there.

The little shoes that look suspiciously like medieval ballet slippers are still there too.

And every now and then I find myself looking up and wondering what future generations will think when they look back at us.

Which of our fashions will they mistake for virtue?

Which of our customs will they assume were commandments?

Which of our habits will they treat as sacred simply because they've survived long enough?

I don't know.

But I suspect God is far less interested in what century our clothing resembles than in how we treat the people wearing it.

Or not wearing it.

* The Turtle’s Diary is a collection of thoughts, insights, and stories based on true-life experiences – all born from the misguided trust in others.

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