Grayer About the Sleeves

Many years ago, when I was a novice and my habit was still dazzlingly white, I said to one of the older sisters, “I think we should all get wimples.” She replied, “That’s because you have no idea what you’re talking about.” I was a little surprised by this answer. Being, as I was back then, briefly, twenty-four years old, and having only been recently been clothed in the habit myself, I was firmly of the opinion that female religious garb existed on an simple, straightforward, continuous spectrum—belt-rosaries and flowing scapulars at one end, cardigans and visible shins at the other—and that the same principle that had guided my initial discernment of the religious life also held true for the living of it: where orthodoxy abounds, there fabric abounds all the more.