Fundy Failure

This is a quote from St. Clement of Alexandria. I think I heard something similar to this quote at my church growing up:

“How womanly it is for one who is a man to comb himself and shave himself with a razor, for the sake of fine effect, and to arrange his hair at the mirror, shave his cheeks, pluck hairs out of them, and smooth them!…For God wished women to be smooth and to rejoice in their locks alone growing spontaneously, as a horse in his mane. But He adorned man like the lions, with a beard, and endowed him as an attribute of manhood, with a hairy chest–a sign of strength and rule …

This, then, is the mark of the man, the beard. By this, he is seen to be a man. It is older than Eve. It is the token of the superior nature….It is therefore unholy to desecrate the symbol of manhood, hairiness.”

- St. Clement of Alexandria

There you have it: If you shave you are “womanly.” At the church I grew up in beards were a manly thing. However, if you were a preacher or minister you most certainly could not have a beard. I’m still not sure what the reasoning is for this. But I know that since Jesus was a preacher and he had a beard and it’s bad to have a beard and be a preacher, He must have only grown a beard so they could pull it out as part of his torturous death that I am so thankful for.