The Joy in Being Naked
Recently, during a few days of silent retreat about an hour north of the monastery, I was having breakfast alone, lost in my thoughts, somewhat entranced by the snow that had begun to fall earlier that morning. A young couple, with their two-year-old son in tow, entered from the far end of the room and after preparing their food, found a seat at a nearby table. After we exchanged the usual pleasantries we often do with complete strangers, the child toddled up, tapped my leg, and offered a children’s book that I didn’t remember he’d had when he entered. The mother quickly interjected, “You don’t mind kids, do you?” “Not at all,” I responded, welcoming the opportunity, knowing deep within that it’s often easier for me to connect with children than it is with adults. I took the book, a story about Noah and the Flood, and began to read aloud the words of a tale that has become familiar to anyone who’s ventured just a few pages into Genesis. I accented the story with my own cast of voices, pointed to the various animals, and made their sounds, which were quickly mimicked by the now entranced boy, and even added my own comedic commentary (which resulted in me being the only one at the table laughing). I left the story, that family, and my breakfast soon after. As I walked back to my room hoping to return to silence, I remembered that there’s more to the story of Noah than the building of an altar on dry land, a promise from God to never again destroy His creation, and a rainbow. The Scriptures seem intent on ending the narrative of Noah, in Genesis 9, with the story of his nakedness.
In fact, the conclusion of Noah goes so far as to emphasize that after having this direct contact with God, hearing Him speak so personally and held in safety with one hand as He “cleansed” his creation with the other, and experiencing an inner abiding as He established a covenant with “you and your descendants after you,”[1] this “man of the soil”[2] planted a vineyard, produced wine, got drunk, and lay naked inside his tent. Something interesting is happening here! Although it probably wouldn’t be appropriate to depict his nudity in a children’s book, the life of Noah is a movement that began long before he came on the scene. We first hear of him described by his father, Lamech, as the one who “shall bring us relief from our work and the toil of our hands, out of the very ground that the Lord has put under a curse.”[3] His story is told as a strong remembrance of the Nephilim, the name given to the “children” of the human and the divine; this knowledge that humanity and divinity may dwell in one being was something already on the consciousness of Noah’s people. When God is saddened by the increasing wickedness of His creation, he turns to Noah, much in the same way that Adam is envisioned in Eden, “a righteous man and blameless in his generation; Noah walked with God.”[4] God then begins to speak, telling his plans for destruction, giving intricate instructions for an ark, and ensuring the safety of Noah and his family. We know the story leading to the rediscovery of dry land by heart: how Noah was ridiculed by others, how he remained faithful to the voice of God and was ultimately saved from devastating waters. What’s often forgotten is that the completion of God’s covenant with Noah isn’t the dry land, or the marking of an altar, but Noah lying in nakedness.
And if we’re going to speak of nakedness, then we should also probably mention those who did it first: the progenitors, Adam and Eve. Our Scriptures open with two accounts of how the known world came into being. The first, in Genesis 1, lays out how God created the heavens and the earth quite logically and sequentially over seven days, with each having a specific contribution. This telling of creation is probably the one we run to most often. It starts with formlessness and darkness, and moves into the apex of existence, the creation of humanity. This explanation is easy to approach; it feels secure in its logic, and it allows us to project our understanding of time back onto God, essentially telling him to “color within these lines.”
The second telling of creation, in Genesis 2, is a bit more difficult to understand. It’s open, less secure, and threatening to our senses, and it is intentionally written to do so. It does away with time, casually mentions “when God made the earth and the heavens,” but doesn’t speak of life until “God formed man out of the clay of the ground and blew into his nostrils the breath of life, and so man became a living being.”[5] The first living thing to come about is humanity. Nothing else in creation ever receives this “breath of life,” but from this act God brings about the Garden of Eden. It’s then that plants and animals find their place. And we know the story from here, how everything that comes into being is created in relation to this garden: “a river rises in Eden to water the garden,”[6] “out of the ground various wild animals and various birds of the air,”[7] and God “took the man and settled him in the garden of Eden, to cultivate it and care for it.”[8] It’s this setting that both Adam (in Hebrew, ‘of the earth’) and Eve (in Hebrew, ‘to breathe’)—the two which have become “one body”[9] through clay and breath—walk with God in the “cool of the evening,”[10] are “naked, yet felt no shame”[11]
We don’t know how long Adam and Eve shared this initial relationship with God, walking with him without covering, without shame. Time is of no importance here. In fact, it hasn’t yet entered into this telling of creation. It does, however, enter soon: at the decision made by both of them, together, to act outside of the expectations of their relationship with God, represented by the fruit produced by knowledge of good and evil. It’s at this moment that “the eyes of both of them were opened, and they realized they were naked.”[12] So they covered their bodies, the physical gifts of creation, and when they heard God searching for them in the garden, they hid themselves among the trees. They fled the relationship they had once shared with Him. And for the first time in recorded history, they felt what had not been there before, and we’re given a name for the covering of ourselves and the fleeing of relationship: shame.
And the only response God has in this moment, and the only response he’s ever had to shame, is “Who told you that you were naked?”[13]
Perhaps the sin of the garden isn’t that Adam and Eve ate the fruit, or even that they recognized their nakedness and felt shame, but that they hid from God. He came to walk with them, and what told of their wrongdoing, their guilt, was their hiding.
This may be quite jarring to hear; that shame is not the “sin” but the hiding it tells us we must do. Shame, in all its forms, can be healthy. It tells us that to be human is to be limited; that not one of us has, or will ever have, unlimited power over our lives. Many spiritual teachers have made themselves rich in both attendance and finances by telling us how we may possess ultimate control over our lives, selling a false hope. In reality, we are finite, “perfectly imperfect,”[14] and these limitations are our essential nature. So our shame becomes toxic, sinful, when it refuses to accept our limits. When it would want nothing more than to run and hide from the eyes of the world. It’s this sense of shame that hides us, constantly strives to define our emotional state, and keeps us from accepting reality at any cost.
This deep sense of shame is largely unconscious, but unconscious doesn’t mean inoperative. Shame reveals to us what we hold dear, where our individual and communal trauma lies, and how it has been transformed into something else. It tells us where and what within us is yearning for connection and, in reality, healing. It’s not the trauma we experience that creates this emotional “illness,” but the inability to express that trauma.[15] It continually emphasizes our “badness,” and makes us feel as if we are unworthy to be embraced. We feel inadequate, ugly, unworthy, not good enough to be loved because we must hide this wound. We become susceptible to the belief that we deserve to be locked out, excommunicated, cast away; that we must be stripped of our membership in the family, community, and religion. We think that’s the proper fate of one who is so wicked and unlovable. And like Adam and Eve, who felt it first, we feel that we must hide ourselves.
And in our hiding, we also carry the shame of others. Many of us grew up in families, and formed relationships, with the expectation that we’re somehow responsible for the emotional responses of others. There may not have been any outward physical, sexual, or verbal abuse, but we still felt the immense pressure to placate those we held close in order to get our basic needs met. This inevitably brought to our surface shame and fear. We internalized the emotions of others, confusing them with our own, letting them inform our identity, and we keep them in hiding by re-experiencing them in our relationships or acting them out in our compulsions.
Part of “uncovering” ourselves, of coming out of hiding, of growing into maturity despite our age, is realizing that God has given us the freedom and strength to take care of ourselves. We no longer play the emotional games of others, and we let them start to be accountable for what they say, do, and how they feel. We no longer pretend and try to manipulate people and things to maintain a sense of emotional security. As we sense the danger of shame seeking its hiding place within us, we remove ourselves, going to where we’re nourished and loved. We’re no longer controlled by others’ shame and fear, and we claim our freedom to let our limitations be seen, none other than the visible expression of divine grace, as an act of self-love.
This is a discipline that demands honesty and being responsible for our own life. If I love myself, I’ll live in reality. I’ll love myself the same way that I seek to love others. This source of inner strength is none other than the voice of God, looking for us “in the cool of the evening,” saying,
I am your God. I have molded you with my own hands, and I love what I have made. I love you with a love that has no limits, because I love you as I am loved. Do not run away from me. Come back to me not once, not twice, but always again. You are my child…I am your God, the God of mercy and compassion, the God of pardon and love, the God of tenderness and care. Please do not say that I have given up on you, that I cannot stand you any more, that there is no way back. It is not true. I so much want you to be with me. I so much want you to be close to me. I know all your thoughts. I hear all your words. I see all your actions. And I love you because you are beautiful, made in my own image, an expression of my most intimate love. Do not judge yourself. Do not condemn yourself. Do not reject yourself. Let my love touch the deepest, most hidden corners of your heart and reveal to you your own beauty, a beauty that you have lost sight of, but will become visible to you again in the light of mercy.[16]
If this is the voice of God calling for us in the garden, He quickly follows it up with the question “Who told you that you were naked?” It’s with great sadness that in modern society, which seems to eagerly seek this division of self and community, there are exponentially more who do so in the name of God. If our religious tradition tells us that we must hide a part of ourselves, that we possess something that is unworthy of the sight of God, that is beyond His grace and unknown to Him, the selves written by the finger of God, then our words are not blessed, and the formulas recited over the Eucharist may do incredible things over bread and wine, but they do not become the Body and Blood of Christ. To partake of the Eucharist is to consume elements of the natural world, made into the substance of God, and we consume not only the physical body of Christ, God incarnate, but also all that holds the image of God, that breath and clay, ourselves and our neighbor. It’s in this moment we can say where God is, but we find great difficulty in saying where He is not. And as the visible expression of Christ’s church, as long as we continue to sow this division, we willingly give up all claim to speak on His behalf.
When Christ formed us from the earth, he expressed humanity as male and female, not to emphasize their differences but to remind us of the “breath” and “clay” that become one body. And so what it means to be human depends less on who is male and female, and where someone may fit in this description, but that we each possess the Adam and Eve, the “soil” and “breath,” within us; one body. It’s as if “one person” consumed that fruit in the garden, “one person” experienced its effect, we feel the response as “one” as we’ve continued to find new ways to hide ourselves.
“Ham, the father of Canaan, saw his father’s nakedness, and he told his two brothers….Shem and Japheth took a robe, and holding it on their backs, they walked backward and covered their father’s nakedness.”[17] The act of being discovered is a scary process. Often our “nakedness” and desire to hide is first noticed by others, long before we’re able to admit it ourselves. We need the help of others, the community, to search for us, to call out like God in the garden or Noah’s sons entering the tent. We need to be found in our attempts to be elusive, and like the sons of Noah who sought to cover him, it’s in this moment we realize that no covering we run to, whether tree or robe, will adequately shield us from the shame we feel. This discovery is often painful. It requires us to let others into our hurts and experiences, those parts of ourselves we’d rather keep from their eyes. This discovery may involve the ending of an abusive relationship with another person, a substance, or a behavior. It may require our making amends and beginning anew. This uncovering may need to be a conversation, the willingness to seek professional help, or the subtle attempt to let go of a situation we once thought we could control. It may require us to seek out the knowledge and compassion He has given to others through medical intervention, counseling, or regular appearance at a support group. For each of us, the very thing that we use to hide ourselves, whether it be a substance, our role in the community, or a behavior we’ve carefully crafted, will be the thing by which we are discovered; it was the fruit of a tree that brought our shame and a tree behind which we hid. Everything we are given in the religious life, including our very lives, we offer back to God as a eucharist. Or we can take that gift and let it become the barrier by which we divide ourselves and one another.
There’s a profound reason that with all the time that passed between Eden and Noah, and all the stories that could’ve been told, the account of Noah immediately follows. The story of Noah answers the story of Adam and Eve. In fact, you might even say it’s all one story. The desire to act outside of a relationship with God resulted in the much-needed feeling of shame, and we immediately hid ourselves. But He answers this shame and doesn’t, in his power, resolve it for us. Instead, He shows us that the answer to division, the remedy to hiding our shame within us, is a flood, cleansing, a reminder of the promise He first spoke to us; it is being discovered in our nakedness, our vulnerability, what we’d like most desperately to hide from others. It’s the feeling of shame that hid us in the garden, seeking whatever would cover us, and like Noah, it’s in our shame that we’re discovered, and a covenant, our relationship with one another and our Creator, our nakedness is realized once again.
[1] Genesis 9:9.
[2] Genesis 9:20
[3] Genesis 5:28
[4] Genesis 6:9. This description would later be used to designate Abraham as ‘father’ of the Israelite people, and the continuation of God’s covenant.
[5] Genesis 2:7
[6] Genesis 2:10
[7] Genesis 2:19
[8] Genesis 2:15
[9] Genesis 2:24
[10] Genesis 3:8
[11] Genesis 2:25.
[12] Genesis 3:7.
[13] Genesis 3:11
[14] Bradshaw, John. Healing The Shame That Binds You. 7.
[15] Alice Miller. Pictures Of Childhood. 1986
[16] Nouwen, Henri. The Road to Daybreak.
[17] Genesis 9:22-23
