Jesus said, "When you strip without being ashamed and you take your clothes and put them under your feet like little children and trample them, then you will see the child of the living one and you will not be afraid."-Gospel of Thomas 37.2-3
Sadly, this year I will not be celebrating World Naked Gardening Day, as I still do not have a garden nor my own place, but I still wish to honor the idea of healthy nudity. I know some of you are wondering what happened to Ignakedio Zaragoza from last year's World Naked Gardening Day / Cinco de Mayo. He is no longer with us. We had some good times, but sadly I neglected to water him, as I am easily distracted. And I'm not much of a plant guy.
So is that it? Am I just going to talk about my past plants and not about the lack of pants? Sorry, that was bad. But no! Since I cannot celebrate properly, I will instead talk about what nudity means to me theologically speaking. Nudity is not merely an inner rebellion to tell society "screw you, I will be naked if I want to be", it is more than that. Because that is what faith and theology do: they bring meaning and symbolism to things that may look mundane to outsiders. Nakedness is very much a part of my faith.
My favorite myth of the Bible is the Garden of Eden. Here we see God making things how they are meant to function. He makes a beautiful garden, where man lives among nature and is happy, until he feels lonely, to which God responds by making a woman out of his side. Both are naked and are not ashamed (Genesis 2.25). Of course, the Promethean serpent talks Eve into eating the fruit of knowledge of Good and Evil, and as a result Adam and Eve feel shame. God asks them how they know they are naked; how could they possibly have a concept of nakedness if they were never clothed? And then we see blame being shifted, a sin which springs up from the original sin, which as we know quickly keeps rolling out of control. Cain kills Abel, etc, etc. It seems like nakedness is no longer a valid option. Sure, shame may be a product of our own insecurities, not a sin, but who cares, we are in a fallen world where we are prone to such contrasts to Eden, right? WRONG. Jesus of Nazareth comes and teaches us to be clean from our sins. Unlike the previous notion of atoning for these sins, Jesus teaches that God loves us as a father, and we don't need to worry about being forgiven if that is what we sincerely want. But he goes further, he teaches us that God's Kingdom, the realm on earth in which man lives as God made us to, is RIGHT HERE. What? Is this real life? And he teaches that we don't need to worry about what we do as much as we worry about our minds, because that is where sin starts. Righteous action naturally follows the righteous mind. This is not to say that we shouldn't be concerned with our actions, but rather that radical transformation starts by transforming the mind, not trying to manipulate actions. We don't need to "cut off our hand" out of fear of it causing us to sin and being cast away from God's presence, because our hand can't cause us to sin in the first place! We can be around sinners and heretics and prostitutes and taboo people, because we are responsible for our sins, not society or anything else! Our minds are the only thing keeping us from God's love. Pretty neat. So now, if we are supposed to be striving for God's Kingdom, AKA Eden, we can be naked. We don't need to let shame inhibit us from the liberation that comes from living life as God has created us to live despite our sins.
So nudity to me is not just being naked, it's about freedom. It symbolizes the freedom from the senseless shame that sin can bring, things that humans have concocted in their own minds. It's a symbol for my life in a world which I am actively working to be unstained from. In fact, early church baptisms were performed totally in the buff, including women (The Apostolic Tradition of Hippolytus, 3rd century CE)! Modesty was highly valued then, yet nothing but your body was permitted to be cleansed in the baptism. Baptism represents the purging of this-worldly corruption. It symbolizes rebirth. In this new life, this acceptance of Jesus' teachings, we can truly stand naked and unashamed before a world that is constantly trying to clothe us with shame. This nudity showed renewal.
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| Early Christian painting of baptism in the nude |
So that's what nakedness is to me in the mythic realms of my mind. It is liberation from wallowing in sin; it is intimacy with God by living how he made me to live; it is a badge of my rebirth. I hope you all can get naked and go water something, and have a great World Naked Gardening Day!
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