Tag Archives: Book of Genesis

Clinical dimensions of “nakedness”

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(Yesterday’s posting was about the subjec of nakedness in the book of Genesis.) The notion of nakedness and vulnerability is also relevant in clinical work. In one of my first cases as a therapist, a young man in his thirties had recurrent images of nakedness in his day to day life, often looking down to see if he was wearing his pants in public. He knew this was “crazy” but he also knew that it was clinically significant. He also quickly saw that this disconcerting imagery was related to several significant recent losses in his life—he had become estranged from his family, he had serious doubts about his childhood faith, and he has resigned from his job. Furthermore, he was feeling estranged from his friends. He had been cast adrift in his life. He had shorn the trappings of the middle class life that had been bequeathed him and he felt vulnerable, he felt naked.

The clinical work involved helping him to embrace this nakedness, to avoid the temptation to immediately “prozac’em”, and to explore the depths of his despair.
It amounted to holding his hands figuratively, allowing the grace of God to envelop him, and to facilitate rebirth. I offered comfort and direction as this young man dwelt for a while in what T. S. Eliot called, “the breakage, in the collapse of what was believed in as most certain, and therefore the fittest for renunciation.” Metaphorically speaking, I was a midwife. Or, a metaphor I like even better, I was a witness to a death, burial, and resurrection.

The theme of nakedness is so relevant to the work of a minister. Frederick Buechner in one of his books (and the specific title escapes my memory) wrote of the need of a minister to find the temerity and courage (and grace) to first “disrobe” his congregation before he could “clothe” it with the Grace of God. He explained that God’s Grace only comes as one is disrobed of his/her pretenses, illusions, false gods, and hypocrisies and that a minister who is not willing to address this facade cannot offer any genuine Grace. Without this disrobing there is only an easy believism that really doesn’t believe anything, there is only a religion of convenience. And, I might add, no minister can accomplish this task if he/she has not been disrobed himself/herself and does not experience recurrently from time to time.

The Illness that we Are

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In the book of Genesis the subject of nakedness is introduced to us.  Adam and Eve ate of the forbidden fruit and felt naked, exposed, and God fashioned for them a fig leaf garment and hid their nakedness.  The Bible said that this garment hid them from their sense of shame.

Art in recent centuries, and movies in recent times, often includes the image of the nude woman, caught unawares, covering her breasts with an arm and/or her privates with a hand.  Most men also have had dreams or fears of that horrible feeling of being caught nude in public, being exposed, being vulnerable.

I think this fig leaf represents the function of the ego in human culture.  It is a contrivance that hides us from our nakedness.  It is a persona that we can present to our community and to the world and not have to show to them the frail, frightened vulnerable creature that we are in the depths of our heart.  And this ego consciousness is very important as without it there would be no “world” as we know it.  For without it, we would be teeming multitudes of quivering flesh and could not function as a culture.  We would not be a world.

But this ego consciousness has become a monster that is run amok and threatens to destroy us.  Instead of acknowledging our frailty and recognizing the frailty of others, we have organized into armed camps the purpose of which is to barricade ourselves behind piles of “stuff”.  Or, to allude briefly to one dimension of the problem, in our country we have isolated into ideologically-armed political camps, each camp unwilling to recognize its own vulnerability.  We are guilty of the sin of misplaced concreteness, “We chase the shade, and let the real be.” (John Masefield)

But as individuals we cannot correct the ills of the world. The only “illness” we are responsible for is illness that we harbor. But we can discover that as we address that illness in our own heart, as we “wage the war we are”, we will be a bit of an antidote to the collective illness that threatens us.