if you love the man who is their father, then you want him to find in you all that makes for a truly virtuous and hard-working wife and mother. You can see right away that the way you appeal to him should not be primarily through your physical beauty. God has gifted you at that level. Furthermore your beauty is such that you need to do little for it to appear. You should therefore not go out of your way to do so. If you are ever tempted to spend too much time on your appearance, read St Teresa of Avila. Gifted with great physical beauty, she details in her autobiography the pitfalls of vanity she fell into in her younger years. She specifies the dangers and slippery slope that goes from beauty to vanity to the risk of losing chastity and one’s honour. This will help you put things in perspective.26 The reason this is so important is that it would be easy for you to attract all kinds of men whom you do not want to be with, while the one you do want to be with you must attract in modest ways. So many women want men to admire their bodies, but in so doing they do not realise they degrade their natural feminine dignity and beauty, and instead appear cheap and vulgar. A virtuous man does not look for that in a woman, even though his fallen nature can certainly be allured by it. No, what he is looking for is natural grace in a good personality. If you have those, you will sooner or later get the right kind of attention from the right kind of man. Favour is deceitful, and beauty is vain: the woman that feareth the Lord, she shall be praised (Pro 31:30). The Objective Norm of Modesty Now coming to some particulars regarding dress, this should be the overarching principle: any clothing that draws attention to any part of your body other than your face is immodest, and if a man takes interest in any other part of your body than your face, it means that he is interested in you for the wrong reasons. If you dress modestly, you are telling him that you have much more to offer than your body. You want him to appreciate you as a gifted person, not a physical trophy to be conquered. In other words, you conceal your body not because it is bad, but because it is so very good. By concealing it, you reveal your true dignity. The dress you described in your previous letter was too short at the bottom and at the top. It drew attention to your flesh in an inappropriate way. That is why you felt so bad. You asked about dresses that flow down to the ankles and the wrists. I will 62
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