Hats are a problem for me. I always boxed in, style-wise. Its hard to branch out. And hats are a good example of that. For a guy my age, from my background, with my personality and what I do, I have basically one hat option: baseball cap. Worn casually, and meant to blend into whatever else I’m doing.

But hats are amazing! There are so many hats! And for religious professionals, think of all the religious hats there are out there! I’ve been working on a thing about hats (or, helmets, rather) and how they signify how we act in the world. So I was looking at images of religious hats, and there are so many and they are so delightful. Look at these!

Here’s a dervish dancer in a hat called a Sikke, which is meant to signify the tombstone of a dancer’s ego.

Here is an Islamic prayer cap, often called a Taqiyah in Arabic (it has many other names and forms in other languages and muslim cultures.)

But consider these hats as well:

It makes me think about the hats I wear (or don’t wear!) What about the hats you wear? Do you wear hats to garden or hike? Do you take off a role or persona when you get home at the end of a work day? Do you put on a grandparent hat that feels more like a care-taker hat sometimes? Are you like the man with too many hats in the famous children’s book wearing a number of hats at the same time?

Our hats can be meaningful parts of ourselves that we carry with us in the world. They can also be difficult things to wear that we need to take off to be fully ourselves. So, what hats are you wearing these days? Are there any you’d like to put on? Any you want to get rid of?

Do you think I could pull off that Indiana Jones fedora?

Sometimes it is hard to tap into our spiritual selves or find time to nurture our creativity and intellectual curiosity. Here is a section that reflects on some nourishing materials from around the web and related media channels in order to get us thinking, get us feeling, and get us reflecting on the lives we are living in this big world. **Some Adult/Mature Themes May Appear in Links and Other Attached Material**

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Allan T. Georgia, MDiv, MTS, PhD

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