"Why Do You Wear These Cool Robes?"

Spring. 2021.

“Pastor Dean, I’ve been meaning to ask you, why do you wear these cool robes?”

A young girl came up to me, looking at my alb and stole - this question asked in the most incongruent of times, after one hundred of us sorrowful people gathered masked and distanced and strange to celebrate the fullness of the Love of God in the life of a man they had loved - one of my parishioners, one we held dear.

This question, asked after the widow following the service, all but grabbed me in her arms and cried thank you. The service was meaningful and hopeful and hard and courageous because the moment requires it - as all deaths and remembrances do, no matter how much we wish to look away or beyond.

This question, asked to me after the long and arduous journey of hospice for the parishioner we loved and still do love, of holding hands and praying and anxiety and lunch with the family and waiting and waiting and God more waiting for all of us. You are loved and we love you and it’s okay and you are loved spoken into the world so that he had no choice but to know it in his bones.

At the moment - only paying half my attention because of the recessing congregation and I’m ready to go home and collapse on my mind - I gave some response about how it represents the work of the pastor and some brief line about it’s historical significance as if she cared - but upon further reflection I would have said this.

Perhaps these robes - alb and stole and clergy shirt and everything that signifies, oh, yeah, pastor - communicate love. Love at its best and love that is hard and enduring and walks to the edges of our humanity and dares to trust all that will come next. Perhaps it’s not so much about an office or a role but a reminder of the reality that we are human beings with a deep desire and drive to remind people - if you don’t feel your belovedness in this moment, let me walk alongside you and reflect it for you, because God knows I’ll need you to do the same for me one day. Perhaps, this old and dusty and worn and creased alb and stole signify I’m almost five years into this and there’s still so much more yet to do. Perhaps, it’s about reminding people who feel all sorts of questions about their futures - because who now would dare to forge a life in small town, rural, back country Minnesota - that a future and a hope is yet and still for them, we just need to trust. Together.

Perhaps, this work is most about future-building.

One that tells us of the people we are and who we are yet to be and what God will do with the land we occupy and people who dare to trust through grief and pain and loss. One that tells us that the worst thing is not the last thing. One that tells us that our love through grief is holiest, hardest, and most transforming experiences we will encounter and on the days when we feel it is impossible to move or breathe or exist we muster courage somehow and someway.

“Why do you wear these cool robes?”

Because everyone deserves to know of their belonging, worth, and courage. Because everyone deserves transformation and new life and possibility. Because God - divine, impossible, Love itself - is now and among us and moving us.

That’s why.