I leave more than the stale air of a thirteen-hour plane ride behind in the airport bathroom stall. When I emerge into the terminal in Istanbul, I feel like a new person altogether.
I had walked off the plane still wearing the evidence of the life I left behind in Bangladesh. I wore a salwar kameez, the three-piece traditional outfit of my adopted South Asian home. The ample cotton dress, baggy pants, and orna (scarf) across my chest spoke clearly about the place where I had boarded the plane.
I emerge from the bathroom looking like a different person in jeans and a T-shirt. I feel a bit scandalous in these first few moments as I walk around with my backside and chest not covered by a second layer of clothing.
I observe people walking by, certain they too must think me inappropriate. When no one stops to stare, I peel off the grey sweater I had been clenching tightly around my chest. I had forgotten what it felt like to wear Western clothing. I push my shoulders back and notice my stride becomes a little stronger.
I love the colorful clothing I get to wear in Dhaka. I shop for dresses that bear my beloved paisleys and gold embellishments. I delight in bell-shaped earrings and bangles that tinkle as they move on my wrist. Not all foreigners who live where I do wear the local dress, but on many occasions, nationals have commented how honored they are that I respect their traditions.
Every now and then I notice though that I carry myself differently than I did in America. I make myself appear smaller, trying to disappear under my orna, when I walk past the staring men at the tea stalls. I avert my eyes from fruit sellers that I am not going to buy from that day and hunch over to watch my own feet navigating the cracked sidewalks and avoid the tail of another street dog. I feel small in a city of millions. I am someone else in that place, someone who doesn’t belong. Am I still me?
I was plunged unexpectedly into change when I booked a ticket back to America because of a family crisis. I am still reeling from the expediency of it all and from the newness I feel. Or is it oldness? Familiarity? I am someone again that I forgot I could be.
I hold my head higher and meet the eyes of men who pass by, nodding at them. In the place I was born famous for its southern hospitality, it is rude not to acknowledge passersby with a rhetorical “How are you?” or at least a smile. I cannot do that in my South Asian home. I quickly put back on my old self, appearing more outgoing, and feeling more confident. I haven’t felt this bold in a year. It feels vaguely familiar and disturbing at the same time.
These thoughts swirl around my head along with the words I read just a few hours earlier as my body fought sleep in the plane cabin. “If to change clothes can be to change one’s sense of self; if to change clothes is to change one’s way of being in the world; if to clothe yourself in a particular kind of garment is to let that garment shape you into its own shape,” writes Lauren Winner in Wearing God, “—then what is it to put on Christ?”
I laugh at the instant real-life application of those words and I wonder at the authenticity of how I carry myself in my many worlds. Am I the same person to new friends in South Asia as I am to those who have known me my whole life in America? Do I live with the same honesty online as I do in my face-to-face friendships?
I want to be a person of integrity, consistency. Do I always reflect Christ? Or do I put him on and take him off like an orna? Do I clothe myself in him day in and day out or when it is convenient, I wonder.
I found Christ in an evangelical faith that focused heavily on right behavior. I heard passages about putting on Christ as emblematic of putting off behaviors not reflective of a Christian and instead “doing right things.” In Romans 13:14 we are commanded to put on Christ, to wake from sleep, to live in such a way that exhibits the characteristics of Jesus.
As I grew and navigated the complexity of American Christianity, more and more people who called themselves followers of Christ around me seemed to exhibit concern for right actions far more than they did for a right heart. It became clear legalism results when action is divorced from intention. This is when it is easy to put on Christ like a piece of clothing, and then discard him at will.
In the Christian contemplative tradition I discovered as an adult hungry for a deepening experience of God, I found something different. The concept of putting on Christ is understood as a deep call to transformation, union with God, and embodying the very life of Christ. Colossians 3:27 tells us we are already children of God, not that we become them by our choices or actions. When we were baptized into Christ, we clothed ourselves in Christ—become participators in his very life.
Putting on Christ is not just a metaphor for good behavior; it is a reflection of the believer’s deep union with Christ.
Gregory of Nyssa, 4th century Bishop and one of the Cappadocian Fathers, taught the need for constant spiritual transformation in the concept of Epectasis, similar to the idea of athletic training. But this progress is not achieved by the might of the person but by an ongoing contemplation of our lives in Christ and a deepening understanding of the absolutely inability of anything to separate us from God.
“Deity is in everything, penetrating it, embracing it, and seated in it,” Gregory says in The Great Catechism (Chapter 25). Speaking of Jesus’ former earthly incarnation in contrast to Christ’s existence with us now, Gregory says: “For although this last form of God's presence among us is not the same as that former presence, still His existence among us equally both then and now is evidenced; only now He Who holds together Nature in existence is transfused in us; while at that other time He was transfused throughout our nature, in order that our nature might by this transfusion of the Divine become itself divine.”
When I consider what the contemplative tradition has to teach me about my union with God, I realize putting on Christ has more to do with letting myself be shaped by Christ than it does with a set of actions. Clothing myself in Christ means allowing myself to be still enough to recognize the union I already have with Christ and the power of the Spirit to transform my outer life as I stay connected to that reality.
“I need to let Jesus, my clothing, affect the way I move. I need to let Jesus affect the way I interact, the way I shape affection, the means by which I negotiate others’ opinions of me,” says Winner.
No more can I be separated from Christ than I can from my own skin. His nature is part of my nature. I can hide that away. Indeed, I can stifle Christ’s life in me, but I can never erase it. I can choose to stay connected to the Divine in me, to stay grounded in that life, and let it flow out of me in the way I live and move in the world.
I know the real me is a combination of all the places I have inhabited, which have made me—the Deep South I come from, the Middle East I called home for a short time, and the Indian subcontinent I so love. I carry the values of my family of origin, often battling those of the family my husband and I have created. I am shaped by all the identities I have worn. They’re all part of the multitudes I contain, the Christ in me that—if I am transparent and authentic—will be evident no matter where I find myself.
I ruminate over these things as I stand in line for the next ten-hour flight, lost in thought when I hear snippets of a conversation spoken in Bangla next to me.
I look up to connect that voice to a Bangladeshi woman in a flowered sari. Looking at me in my current clothing she would have no idea that I understand the words she says to her daughter.
She meets my gaze, and I wonder what she thinks when she looks at me. Does it matter? Or does it really matter that there is an opportunity for her to see Christ here? Can I be evidence of him for her in this airport boarding line?
I feel compelled to bridge the space between us, to reach out to her. I smile and hold her eyes. “Bhalo achen?” I say to her (which is the Bangla equivalent of “how are you?”).
Her eyes light up with surprise and joy as she responds with a delighted laugh, “Bhalo!”
There in that airport line we look like two people who would have nothing in common, but underneath that appearance is a connection that is real. In that moment we are not an American and a Bengali.
We are two people who feel seen for all that we are. And that is enough.
*Originally published November 20, 2018 at The Mudroom. Updated and republished on September 16, 2024.
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