OUTWARD AND VISIBLE: ON COVERING MY HEAD AS AN EPISCOPALIAN
V. The Lord is in his holy temple.
R. Let all the earth keep silence before him.
I grew up hearing these words as a choral introit sung from the west end of my home parish. I don’t have a clear memory of which liturgical seasons it was used for, but I do remember how it made me feel: excited, and focused, and like what we were about to do was special.
I like to think my journey toward covering my head in church started with that feeling, and with my grandmother. She and I were not particularly close—this was partly a function of her living twelve hours away from me—but when she died, during my sophomore year of college, I inherited her chapel cap. A family friend who helped pack up my grandmother’s belongings tucked away a black circle of lace and gave it to me when she got back to Detroit from South Carolina.
By this point in my life, I was surrounded by people who covered their heads for religious reasons: my hijabi classmates, the Orthodox Jewish men and women who ate at our kosher dining hall, women at church who pulled the long end of their saris over their hair when they entered the nave. The reasons for these practices are various and particular to their respective faith traditions, but they are all an outward, physical sign of that faith, something I’ve always been attracted to. I often feel that I need the tangible to help tether me to the intangible, which is also why I like stained glass, and the sacraments.
I didn’t actually start covering my head in church until about two years after I inherited that chapel cap. I was nervous about the assumptions people might make, and nervous about calling attention to myself. In fact, I waited until I was in another country with people who had never met me before. My senior year of college I spent spring break in Paris on a school trip, and because I’d taken the related class as an independent study I didn’t meet my classmates until shortly before we departed. I looped a pashmina scarf around my neck and pulled it up over my hair every time we went inside a church. Wandering around Notre Dame and Chartres Cathedral with my head covered felt incredibly right. My roommate on that trip was hijabi; when she asked me why I wore a scarf in church, I told her it was out of respect for the house of God. She understood, perhaps better than anyone else who’s asked me.
“Respect for the house of God” is an answer I came up with more or less on my own. Trying to do research on head covering in the Episcopal Church leads to a lot of dead ends. The entry for “veil” in the online dictionary of the Episcopal Church’s website only discusses the article of clothing as part of a habit worn by members of religious orders. Most of the online resources I have found concerning chapel veils are from Roman Catholic sources that are largely irrelevant to my experience. Many of these sources really lean into the rigid gender binary thinking that is, unfortunately, a consequence of the only passage in the New Testament that mentions head covering in worship.
In his first letter to the Corinthians, Paul writes, “Any woman who prays or prophesies with her head unveiled disgraces her head—it is one and the same thing as having her head shaved. For if a woman will not veil herself, then she should cut off her hair; but if it is disgraceful for a woman to have her hair cut off or to be shaved, she should wear a veil. For a man ought not to have his head veiled, since he is the image and reflection of God; but woman is the reflection of man. Indeed, man was not made from woman, but woman from man. Neither was man created for the sake of woman, but woman for the sake of man” (11:5-9, NRSV).
Granted, I am not a Pauline scholar, but this passage makes me want to roll my eyes so hard I see into next week. Its use as justification for head covering in church has real and negative consequences. While no one at my home parish batted an eye when I showed up for Christmas Eve in a chapel cap, various parishioners in the city where I currently reside have made assumptions about my beliefs and my personality based on the fact that I put a piece of fabric on my head when I’m in the same room as the reserved sacrament. One Sunday, as I was leaving the nave during the postlude, a man I had never seen before in my life grabbed my hand as I passed his pew, gestured to my head, and said that it was so good to see someone “doing things the right way.” I believe people have assumed that I have conservative views or a submissive personality, and when they realized I don’t, they became less interested in knowing me.
What these men (and so far, it’s always been men) have failed to realize is that I may cover my head in church, but, as Billie Holliday once sang, it ain’t nobody’s business if I do.
I want to encourage a wider discussion of head covering in the Episcopal tradition, because people are interested. The lack of specifically Episcopal guidance is keenly felt, as is the baggage surrounding conservatism and gender. I have one friend who has some desire to cover her head in church, but she used to sing in the choir of an Episcopal parish where chapel caps were compulsory for ladies of the choir, and she is now somewhat put off by the negative association of that parish with the practice. Another friend of mine is deeply interested in head covering, but they’re nonbinary, and head covering in church is assumed to be the prerogative of women. Jo isn’t a woman, and they don’t want to be mistaken for one, but they’re drawn to that outward, physical reminder that God is as close as the top of our heads. (Interestingly enough, Jo and I had this conversation in front of a mutual friend who is nonbinary and Jewish and wears a kippah at temple. Their advice was to do what feels right, and I wholeheartedly agree.)
This is an optional spiritual practice; as such, it won’t be to everyone’s taste, and there is nothing wrong with that. It has, however, been incredibly fulfilling for me, and I want people to know that it is an option. And much as I want to be rather private about it—well, as private as a physical practice I only do in a public space can be—I also want to run to the top of the nearest hill and yell that you can cover your head in church out of respect for the glory of God and still reject the gender binary, resist patriarchy, and advocate for inclusion.
Please consider this the nearest proverbial hill.
I am a fairly private person, at least where prayer is concerned. When I’m sitting in a congregation, I like to make myself as small and still as possible. Part of my desire to wear a scarf or chapel cap stemmed from the hope it would be another layer of “I’m here for God, please don’t look at me.” After two years, my head covering practice has actually made me less concerned about the image I project to other people, and more concerned about how I live. God is as close to me as my chapel cap, so how well do I listen to God? I cover my head out of respect for God, so how do I show that respect through my actions? Veiling part of my appearance reminds me that I am called to die to myself in order to live in Christ, so how can I seek and serve the will of God?
The last time I worshipped at my home parish, I got to share a pew with my favorite three-year-old, who is fascinated with my chapel cap and ran his hands over it when I held him during the Gospel procession. As the procession returned to the altar, he asked me why I wore it, and we had a whispered conversation about it before the sermon started. It was the opposite of inconspicuous, and it brought me so much joy. Now every time I pull a scarf over my head or pin a chapel cap to my hair, I think of that little boy. I think of my whole church family and the life I am called to in Christ, and I feel that same excitement and focus I felt when I was eleven, listening to the choir sing the introit.
