On Being Naked

I learned the story of Adam and Eve something like this: Adam and Eve are made in the image of God, put in the Garden of Eden, and told to stay away from a particular tree—the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Surprise, surprise, they break the only rule in the garden, eat the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil (which looks a lot like an apple), and discover they are naked.

Then comes fig leaves, getting caught by God, expulsion, sex, death, work, war, shopping, famine, traffic, terrorism, 401(k)s and all the rest.

Without full consciousness of it, I always interpreted that knowledge of nakedness as a kind of booby prize—the gotcha that lets them know they aren’t going to get away with this, and something separate from the promised knowledge of good and evil.

But what if knowledge of our nakedness is knowledge of good and evil? What if the serpent told the truth when he told Eve that eating the fruit would make them “like God, knowing good and evil” (Gen 3:5)? What does it mean to be naked, and where did I get this assumption that being naked was something like the opposite of being godlike?

Isn’t God naked?

We wear clothes to protect ourselves from the elements, and to announce our status (gender, rank, wealth, etc.) One would presume God does not require either wardrobe function.

What does it mean to be naked? You are exposed, there for all the world to see. God isn’t quite as obvious as a Madonna billboard or Mount Rushmore, but there is this hope of coming to God’s presence…and that hope does not quite jive with a behind-the-curtain-Wizard-of-Oz kind of set-up. I realize I am exploring the flaws in the theology that I’ve been taught, but it feels kind of right to think that the difficulty in “seeing” God lies with a kind of human blindness, rather than a divine disguise.

So, if we were to catch a glimpse…would it really be of ermine robes or something double-breasted, by Yves Saint Laurent?

I’m thinking God would be a little bit more…naked.

So then what? If being naked is being like God, and if knowing you are naked is knowing something of good and evil, is there a way we can make sense of this?

I’m thinking, maybe, yes. I’m thinking maybe being naked is a lot like being lonely. I’m thinking when you’re naked, there lies all your skin…the line between what’s you and what is not you, the limits of yourself, the sack you’re in.

In Greek mythology it’s clearer, that the gods created humans so there’d be someone there to worship them. But the Judeo-Christian story can be seen in similar ways: first God creates beauty—light and darkness, form and void. Then entertainment: animals and plants, growth, drama, competition. And then—because it wasn’t finished yet—relationship. A living thing in God’s own image.

In Genesis 1, people are created male and female; in the second chapter Adam is created first, and the need for relationship is announced more clearly: Adam’s given all the plants and animals and those are not enough. He needs an equal, which he receives when Eve is shaped out of his very self. Whose to say the Bible doesn’t say that we are similarly shaped by God, of God’s own stuff?

But why, then, the prohibition in the Garden? I think of all the parents that I’ve known or read, and what they’d give to shield their children from the fact of their own vulnerability. Gay parents—or straight parents of gay kids—who spend sleepless night in dread of the day their children face homophobia: blank, naked, unmistakable. Families who know their children will be injured in the racism of their world, the religious bigotry, the intolerance or lack of hospitality of physical or mental difference.

Perhaps God, having realized the longing for relationship, the vulnerability—the nakedness—that it creates, sought to shield us from the same.

There’s a way to read the Hebrew Bible and the Christian Gospels as a history of God’s relationship with human beings. First, there’s only one rule—then a thousand. Then it gets trimmed to the ten biggies, then Jesus boils it down to one or two. There’s the rage and flood, and then regret. There’s demanding Abraham sacrifice his son; there’s relenting. Then there’s realizing just whose son will die.

Doesn’t anyone whose ever been in a relationship of any standing recognize these tides and patterns?

Maybe realizing we are naked means realizing that we are alone—and wanting desperately to do something about that. And sex and war and all the rest…aren’t these all attempts, once and for all, to feel safe and well-connected, to be secure in a relationship? maybe all this mess of human history isn’t all that different from divine creation after all.

Push come to shove, and I can’t be sure if my faith rests on something other and divine, or if its merely trust in some accumulated wisdom of my species, stumbling forward in an astronomical and biological fluke. But this story, of this Garden, it’s hung around through all these ages. We’ve told it to each other to understand each other better. And whether hunch or habit, heritage or heresy, I think there’s value in this poking at the story, weighing its plot against our understanding of the world, seeing if perhaps there’s something there we haven’t seen before.

© 2008 Melissa Capers