Naked. What does that word make me feel (to formulate JLB’s question to myself)? I want to say it makes me feel something akin to distaste, maybe embarrassment. What about my own nakedness? I think I feel pride mixed with shame—almost as if glory were involved, or its potential, but what my nakedness reveals at present is not what it might yet be. Perhaps I’m thinking of physical nakedness. But what about the spiritual nakedness, more pertinent?
I’m tempted to say I’ve come to be comfortable with spiritual nakedness. (I know what it is, don’t I?). I know my own shame; I know the things about me I want to hide. And I have laid them bare to God, even to a few others.
What, though, if I don’t know my own nakedness? What aspects of it do I not see? What fig leaves do I unknowingly wear?
God knows me. It behooves then me to drop the act before him. I may accept that he loves me as I am, not as I would like to appear.
In the bonds of covenant, nakedness is safe. But with what fire has it outside that ring ravaged. What glory seems a naked woman, beautiful. What folly the imagination works on those forms. With what industry has man exploited this body-spirit phenomenon. What havoc wrought on the brain. What damage done to bonds not made.
“Blind contingencies of nature made this.”
“It is meaningless, and benign.”
“It is overestimated,” while a system
Sells it and all with it for the price of souls.
“It is for you—use it as you will.”
“It is a construct, so construct it as you might
(Make use of these blueprints, though).”
“It is an unhappy compromise,
A ‘fair defect of nature’” (X.891-2);
Or “it is a happy accident, and if license
Or repression enthralled to ‘foul
Exorbitant desire,’(III.177), well then,
You happened as you were,
‘Sufficient to have stood, though free to fall’” (III.99).
If it just happened, it bears the “blind impress” of ancient accidents. And say what postmodernity will, our “behavings bear” its marks.
Deny intrinsic nature or the knowledge thereof and obey your phantom’s dictates. Say of yourself what you will. Look into yourself and see a deep well of nothing; empty into it whatever endless content you wish. Draw an arrow from the ring or straighten the lines into an addition sign: naming a thing makes it what it is, you say.
Let the caterpillar become anything but a butterfly—emerge from the chrysalis and chew leaves again. Let the tiger call itself a lamb and bloody the waters when it dips its maw to drink. Let the penguin say it rides the air, and swim away from sea lions.
You may turn right or left by degrees, but in a maze, you will run into walls.
In the end, you might well say:
That is no country for old men. The young
In one another’s arms, birds in the trees,
—Those dying generations—at their song,
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies. (Yeats, 1-6)
Will you sail, then, to Byzantium?
Can the Ethiopian change his skin
Or the leopard his spots? (Jeremiah 13:23)
Not back then, he couldn’t. But now he can. And so it goes if it all simply happened. But what if it didn’t just happen? What if the impress we bear isn’t blind—if words weren’t our creations—if more than being, there was becoming—if before being, there was a word?
C.S. Lewis, in Miracles, writes: “We find ourselves in a world of transporting pleasures, ravishing beauties, and tantalizing possibilities, but all constantly being destroyed, all coming to nothing. Nature has all the air of a good thing spoiled.”
If he is right, it all didn’t simply happen. What we have is a distortion of what was:
“This is now bone of my bones,
And flesh of my flesh;
She shall be called Woman,
Because she was taken out of Man.”
For this cause a man shall leave his father and mother, and shall cleave to his wife; and they shall become one flesh.
And the man and his wife were both naked and were not ashamed. (Genesis 2:23-25)
Are you alone? Do you burn? Are you ashamed? Do you tremble in your fig leaves? Do God’s garments of skin chafe you? All is not as it ought to have been:
Then the Lord God said, “It is not good for the man to be alone; I will make him a helper suitable for him. (Genesis 2:18)
Is that offensive? Remember, they were naked and unashamed.