(Wikimedia Commons)
I’m pleased at these changes:
Two personal experiences:
1.
Many years ago, in the early afternoon of an exceptionally hot summer day during my mission in Switzerland, my companion and I were tracting and knocked on a door.
A man opened the door and immediately invited us in, something that we weren’t accustomed to.
“You’re Mormon missionaries, right?” he asked.
We said that yes, we were.
“I thought so,” he replied. “I knew that you had to be Mormon missionaries, because nobody else would be so stupid as to wear black suit coats on a day like this. I’m not at all interested in your message, but I’m a doctor and you need to have some water.”
He had a point.
2.
Years later, I was summoned up to Salt Lake City to be set apart for service on the Church’s Gospel Doctrine Writing Committee. It was, again, an unusually hot summer afternoon. I arrived a bit early, so I sat across from Church headquarters and had something to drink while I waited for my appointment.
Periodically, Church employees passed by, wearing dark suits, white shirts, and ties. Nobody else in the area was dressed that way. Even the businessmen, while wearing ties, weren’t wearing jackets.
It occurred to me that the scene was rather like St. Peter’s Square in Vatican City, with the Mormon equivalent of black-robed priests going to and fro. While we Latter-day Saints might find their medieval outfits — frozen in time — a bit curious, we ourselves, I thought, had created a similarly distinct ecclesiastical “uniform.”
I’m happy to see the rules loosened up a bit.
Posted from the Mediterranean Sea
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