Dressing for
Success
Washington Irving describes a fellow–fisherman:
“One of our party had equalled the Don (Quixote) in the fulness of his being
attired capapie (head to foot) for the enterprise. He wore a broad–skirted
fustian coat, perplexed with half a hundred pockets; a pair of stout shoes and
leathern gaiters; a basket slung on one side for fish; a patent rod, a landing
net, and a score of other inconveniences only to be found in the true angler’s
armory. Thus harnessed for the field, he was as great a matter of stare and
wonderment among the country folk, who had never seen a regular angler, as was
the steel-clad hero of La Mancha among the goatherds of the Sierra Morena.”
You can almost always spot tourists fishing
an Idaho trout stream: They look like they just stepped out of an Orvis summer
catalogue. The locals, by comparison look downright prosaic, a quirky
observation that set me to thinking.
I have to get dressed every morning; the
Fall mandates it. I stare into my closet and ask myself, “What should I wear?”
There are no biblical parameters to guide
me, beyond being modest in one’s apparel, but it occurs to me that whatever I
put on I shouldn't want to be an object of "stare and wonderment."
Advertisements entice us to be noticed,
but we have a different motivation: to be “clothed with humility,” (1 Peter
5:5), one practical application of which is the desire to blend in and not
attract attention to ourselves. Augustine counseled his students, “Do not
attract attention by the way you dress. Endeavor to impress by your manner of
life, not by the clothes you wear.”
One practical result of this idea is that
we become less preoccupied with ourselves and how we look and thus may
begin to think more highly of others than we do of ourselves (Philippians 2:3).
George MacDonald put the same idea in his typically delightful way: “The wearer
of Grandmother’s (Wisdom’s) clothes seldom thinks about how he or she looks,
but thinks how handsome other people are” (The Golden Key).
David Roper
4.11.7
