I? Am a hat person.
According to arcane rules that most people have forgotten, men doff their hats upon entering any building, esp. a church, and ladies get to leave theirs in place. I have always thought that this was related to the number of hat pins and other methodologies employed by ladies with proper millinery to keep the things in place. I have to be careful about which hats I purchase or make, so that they sit on my head without resorting to anything other than friction and gravity, because our modern world doesn't deal well with hats.
It occurred to me this morning as I was undoing the one hat pin I had allowed myself (a concession to the wind), that as a relic of an earlier era, hats highlighted one of the other major changes in the church. In the days when a proper chapeau was de rigeur for church, it was also absolutely unheard of for a woman to serve at the altar in any capacity. And here, I was unpinning my hat so that I could don my robe, and be the worship leader in an Anglo-catholic Episcopalian parish.
Times, they change, sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse.
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