If You Don’t Want To Buy A “Nap Dress” You Can Try Reading Your Bible

Update: The tweet I talk about below, attributed to Chelsea Clinton, is probably not by her. Some nefarious person must have made it up. Still, I do recommend reading the Bible and believing in the Resurrection of the Dead, and sleeping in the middle of the day.

I am waffling between two opinions this morning. On the one hand, I discovered the trend of the nap dress for the first time. From Elle:

Also, these dresses are just…nightgowns? My arguments against the Nap Dress are mostly predicated on my disinterest in feeling adrift in sleep attire when I would rather feel snuggly contained, but I have no judgment for people who wear and love nightgowns. Some of my best grandmothers wore nightgowns. I find their associations comforting, even if the experience of getting twisted up in their superfluous yards of fabric all night is not. But if that’s your bag, then my one hope is that you don’t dismiss all the other nightgowns of the world just because one of them happens to be called “The Nap Dress”. Play the field!

I agree so much that trying to go to sleep is such a terrible business–and stay that way–but I don’t think I will indulge in the Nap Dress trend. Also, this piece about what we will all wear as the world goes back to its old ways is pretty good. From the Atlantic:

Pestilence has a long history of influencing how people dress. The bubonic plague killed as much as half of Europe’s population in the 1300s, leaving survivors with hefty inheritances and higher wages. Some historians credit the plague for sparking demand for finely tailored clothing and luxury goods—clothes became tighter, decorative features like buttons and fur trim became more common, people got really into grand headdresses. In this way, the plague gave rise to the Italian fashion industry, which still helps set global trends.

Later Europeans enshrined disease in their wardrobes a little more directly. By the end of the 18th century, Europe’s tuberculosis epidemic had been thoroughly romanticized, the emaciation it caused reflected in the age’s wasp-waisted corsetry. A century later, people became nervous that ground-dragging skirts kicked up filth and disease, and in the early 1900s, women began hitching up the excess material with handheld grips, which eventually led to shorter skirts and the beginning of the end of Victorian aesthetics.

But for historical clues about how Americans might dress after the pandemic, Valerie Steele, a fashion historian and the director of the Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology, in New York, says that the most compelling comparison is probably to the Roaring ’20s. That period followed an extended flu pandemic and the First World War, both of which had exhausted and disillusioned many Americans. “Young people were like, This was just handled so badly. It was a debacle. How can you expect us to follow your rules? ” she told me. Sound familiar?

Both articles are pretty good, if you’re looking for some light reading to take your mind off anything important. Less pleasant was my other option for a morning post:

This tweet is so wonderful for so many reasons. The first, of course, is the line “If Jesus were alive today.” Should someone tell her? Has she really no idea that Jesus is, in fact, very much alive today? That this basic fact is literally why we even have this religion–because he is alive. I mean, surely if you’re going to reprove someone about their own beliefs, the least one could do would be to investigate and then at the very least mouth what that person really does believe. This, even more than the Nap Dress, must be peak 2021.

Then, wonderfully, we come to the idea that Jesus would be working at Planned Parenthood. I mean, I know that Jesus ate with sinners and spent time with tax collectors and prostitutes. That much is well-traveled ground. But then, most people who have “read the Bible,” have noticed that Jesus pulled those people away from those bad situations. He…what’s the word? Oh! I remember, he saved them. That’s where he came to die on the cross and then, get this, rise again from the dead so that those who are caught in egregious and bad sins can be delivered of those sins and given eternal life. They don’t keep on being tax collectors and sinners. They join the church and slowly leave the bad things behind as they are transformed into the likeness of the Son, their Lord. Sooo, anyway, of course, Ms. Clinton thinks that abortion is not a sin, and that God, of all people, gave her the “right to choose” her own life over the life of her unborn child, which is a pretty epic declaration, given that God created both the woman and the unborn child in his own image, in the image of God created he them. And then, because the image was broken and ruined, he himself came to live in the flesh to restore that image and remake them into his image. It is a wonderful back and forth–God giving us hope when we had yet rejected him and all he has made.

So, I am very sure that Jesus, being literally alive today, does send his own body, the church, into the ruins of Planned Parenthood to call to women who are caught in such a terrible choice, who think that the only way out is death and not life, and that it is absolutely reasonable for Leaders in Christ’s own church to refuse to give Christ’s own body to people who lie about this very very very basic idea that can be easily understood with just a little bit of calm conversation and prayer.

I do think it would be lovely if Ms. Clinton would “read her Bible,” because there she would find a God who rescues all of us out of such terrible binary “choices” that cause us to “chose” death and destruction rather than the beauty and wonder of God’s own creation. I pray she will do just that. Perhaps she could don one of those strange “Nap Dresses,” settle herself comfortably in a nice big chair, wipe the dust off of whatever copy she has lying around, and start reading. That, as so many Christians know, is one of the best ways to fall asleep. It’s so strange and soothing. Whenever I read mine, I fall into a dead slumber no matter what I’m wearing.

And now, if you will excuse me, I will go look at my new lovely mold-free floor. It’s so beautiful.

Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash