I attended Mass at the New Camoldoli hermitage near Big Sur in early January - on the Sunday celebrating the Baptism of the Lord. It was a ravishingly clear day on California's rugged central coast, sea so bright it hurt my shaded eyes, sky so blue it stung my fogged-in heart. Perched in tree-filled mountains overlooking the Pacific, the simplicity of the chapel invited me to breathe and declutter my mind. As the monks walked in, all robed in white and enveloped in frankincense, I glanced down at the cover of the Sunday program. It was decorated with a print of an old Greek painting of Jesus being baptized in the Jordan.
And Jesus was naked.
Not “naked” as he's often depicted on the cross–with some kind of cloth strategically covering the family jewels - but out-and-out-naked, stark naked, plainly, unassumingly, nakedly naked, his penis a pale fish bobbing a foot or so beneath the clear surface of the water.
And the homily quite intentionally focused on the nakedness of Jesus at his baptism. As the priest explained, this event probably did not involve physical nakedness - the cover of that Sunday's program notwithstanding - since it was most likely that Jews of 2000 years ago, with their culturally-prescribed rules concerning the human body, were clothed during their religious rituals. Jesus' nakedness was a nakedness of heart, a humility of spirit through which he could offer himself, body and soul and mind, in love and service to the All-in-all. His followers, too, are invited again and again to step into these baptismal waters – openly, transparently, baring all, seeking atonement, withholding nothing, clinging to no thing – and from that space of radical vulnerability, become an instrument of God.
Listening to a homily on nakedness with the naked Jesus peering up at me from the program cover, I couldn't help but chuckle. I had spent the previous evening naked in an outdoor hot mineral-springs pool at the nearby Esalen Institute, bathing with several naked friends whom I'd met through Integral Naked, one of Integral Institute's multiplex websites.
Unlike some of my well-traveled friends, I'm not sophisticated and nonchalant when it comes to public nudity. True: there was a very brief time, between the ages of three and six, when I took great joy in my unclothed body. I bathed unashamedly, with the door open, as had always been the case when my mother washed me. I gleefully ran around the house with nothing on, relishing the freedom of my own bare skin, tasting the temperatures and textures of the world without unnecessary protective layers. Since my mother was the one who set the standards for how one was to act inside the house, and since she often lolled partly nude herself (most often simply topless, especially during hot and humid weather) the unclothed body was perfectly acceptable to me. “Nekkid we came into this world,” my mother would say, paraphrasing Job of the Hebrew Scriptures, “and nekkid we will leave it.” While I knew that people had to wear clothes in public, I found that I preferred the unboundaried feeling that came with naked lounging-around-the-house. And I fully recognized that nudity, especially my own, was beautiful. My older sister sometimes took photos of me romping in the nude - typically at my own enthusiastic request.
And then, at some point, all of that simply ended. A clothing rule was set in place: first, always pants on, and eventually, always an undershirt on as well. By seven, I’d fully rescinded the joys of my childhood nudity. And once adolescence hit -- when one typically feels so visible, so exposed, so obvious, I was self-conscious to the extreme – always feeling “naked” no matter what clothes I wore, and (of course) unable to relish that feeling. The constant onslaught of never-achievable but culturally-lauded images of female beauty helped to guarantee that.
I doubt there will be a full return to the ingenuousness that allowed me to innocently revel in my own physical nakedness as a toddler. I've had no nude beach or nude sunbathing or nudist camp experience. I'm not even at ease with my own nakedness in women's gyms and locker rooms, among other naked women. And I cannot help but notice that many other women are similarly uncomfortable when they're changing clothes next to each other in the locker room. In these cases, it seems to me, we are not even worried about measuring up to some impossibly unachievable standard of beauty - it's more like a concern that our bodies are just plain not acceptable, not allowable. We seem to think we’re not even up to the standard of ordinary and normal. We often fear that our shape or our skin or our flab is shocking, disturbing, repulsive in some way. We may pretend nonchalance as we hurry in and out of our clothes, but we are secretly ashamed of our intolerable bodies, be they rebelliously large, conceding to gravity, not feminine enough, unbearably soft, wrinkled, shockingly pale, pendulous, scarred, crooked, uneven . . .
Even those who have been Declared Acceptable and Beautiful are not free from anxiety about their appearance. I recall a brief clip of “Top Model” Tyra Banks (who was once hounded in the entertainment press for weighing - egads! 161 pounds! crucify her!) interviewing singer Janet Jackson. In a discussion of body image anxieties, JJ recounted a story of how a counselor-friend gave her a private exercise: she was to stand in front of a mirror naked, and allow herself to discover one part of her body that she thought was beautiful. Janet explained that when she did so, she actually broke down and cried. She looked but could find nothing lovely about her body. “I've never thought of myself as attractive,” she admitted. “I work at it, but I never feel beautiful.” Eventually, after repeating the exercise, she was able to acknowledge that she appreciated the sway of her back.
The woman who bared her pierced nipple to millions at the Superbowl cries when she sees herself naked? But nearly every woman I know feels similarly: if they're going to look in a mirror at themselves, they would prefer to be clothed, not naked. (When I did this exercise I conceded that my belly-button wasn't bad. It's just that whale of a stomach in which it’s embedded. . . )
So when my husband and I had the opportunity to spend a couple of days at Esalen with several friends, a visit that would likely include a dip or two in the clothing-optional hot-spring-fed pools, at first I quelled my feeling of dis-ease by noting that I still could make the choice to wear a bathing suit. Nobody (other than my husband, who has seen so much of me for so many years that he no longer knows what I look like) would have to be faced with the outrageous misfortune of seeing this unacceptable naked body. Hunh-unh. Options were available. This is a free country, after all. Thank God.
Then I began to wonder: would there be any other people wearing swimming suits? According to my husband, who had visited Esalen years before, probably no one else would be in a bathing suit. This might be a quandary. Because if everyone else was going to be nude, my clothed body would stand out more than my nude body would … my prudishness, vanity, and culturally-encoded fears would be right out there for all to see. In effect, I could even be more exposed, more naked, if I wore a bathing suit.
Damned if I do and damned if I don't.
So if I was to be damned no matter what, why not just go ahead and be naked in the unsuited way?
Still, I had to take myself through a mental gauntlet: Could I be comfortably naked in a semi-public place and in front of my delightful friends? On the one hand, would my broad thighs, crooked butt-crack and gargantuan, H-cup breastiges really disturb the natives? What if they looked at me? What if they could not look at me? What if they could not help but look at me because I was such a FREAK of nature? A superfreak, in fact: the kind you don't take home to mother, unless of course you end up sitting next to your young friend's naked mom (as I eventually did), a lovely woman your age whom gravity has treated more kindly…
I tried to imagine the reactions of those who might glimpse me naked. It would be okay if so-and-so saw me naked, I suppose, but what about so-and-so? I mean, what if X really were to discover that I had acne scars - on my stomach??? Would X be everlastingly disgusted? Would I unwittingly make X feel awkward, or would X unwittingly make me feel awkward? Would X feel pity for me, or talk about me behind my back, or secretly gawk at my blubberous boobs? Or worse: silently laugh? And further, I asked myself - feeling increasingly indignant - what the fuck kind of human being would X be if they were so easily and readily put off by a plain old ordinary woman's body? I mean, really, what kind of a deranged, life-denying, mean-spirited motherfucker cannot handle the truth revealed in an unclothed female body? That's right, X, you and all the other willfully deluded assholes in this willfully deluded world: I'm a big strapping wonderwench with thunder thighs, and where there's thunder, there's lightning, so if you can't handle my naked body, you can just go straight to hell where you will be condemned to an eternity of eating lukewarm oatmeal with absolutely perfect, unerringly acceptable, always-clothed people who would never ever dream of exposing even the tips of their toenails to your heartless eyes.
Jesus. Was I really that upset about how others might perceive me? I mean, beyond the envy-provoking possibilities of being compared to younger and leaner women – I didn't seem to be worried about anybody else's nudity. Being surrounded by other naked people, male or female, would be great, right? I was not afraid to be in the presence of naked friends, right? I was not afraid for anyone to see my husband naked, or for my husband to see others naked, right? I did not anticipate being appalled or outraged in any way by any imperfections or wrinkles or lumps or sagginesses of my friends. And in fact, wouldn't anybody else's “imperfections” only make me feel more relaxed about my own? That would seem to be the case. But I was still quite anxious.
So what was it that made me feel somehow more deserving of attention and “judgment” in this arena? Did I imagine myself to be special in some way that gave my nakedness more gravitas than the others? Did I presume that my buddies seriously cared that I had the body of an overweight middle-aged woman - as if my clothes had managed to hide that fact from them - and that my stretchmarks and flabby arms were somehow going to be this profoundly life-changing disappointment for them? Did I think that I was actually going to lose the affection and camaraderie of my friends once they caught a glimpse of my cellulite? And if by some ridiculous chance they were to reject me for such inconsequential things, wouldn't this naked soak provide a perfect opportunity to be rid of such friends anyway? I mean, come on: Did I really think that me, myself, and my physical nakedness mattered that much in the grand scheme of the cosmos?
The answers to most of those questions, of course, is no. The crux of all of this nudity nausea was something even more disquieting. For one thing, I was projecting my own internalized cultural hatred of my body on to my friends. But this deep fear and certitude that my nakedness would be result in judgments and rejection from my friends was suggestive of something lurking still deeper in the shadowlands. My fear of the judgment of others points right back at me, at my own unacknowledged tendency to judge and criticize and gawk and point at others. Even at their nakedness, their unavoidable flaws, their painful vulnerabilities, their tender unshielded being stripped of adornments and protections and illusions.
I'm not as tolerant and all-embracing as I'd like to think that I am. Although I often wear the clothes of charity and acceptance, in truth I am one of those willfully deluded assholes, a denial diva clinging to the illusion that the body should not change, age, speak of failure as well as joy, always live as it always dies … holding tight to the lie that sagginess and softness and lines and pockmarks do not have stories worth telling, and interiorly critical of and distraught by all that hints of death and impermanence.
But a couple of stories offered me strength as I pondered my upcoming date with public nakedness. Years ago my friend Karen, at age 60, agreed to be a part of an art project depicting nude women from every decade of adult life. Along with seven other women ranging from 20 to 80-plus years of age, she had several solitary photos of her taken standing in the nude. But Karen's presence in the project would add something extra - she was to be the only woman missing a breast. A decade before, she had lost her right breast to cancer, and she had also decided to remove the implant that had replaced it for a few years. On the night of the exhibition's opening, a friend and I joined her to celebrate. The completed prints were very large, with images almost twice the size of a human body, and so they each shone forth with great feminine presence - so much radiance that I noticed that people found it a little difficult, perhaps somewhat intimidating, to stand too close to any of the seven photos. Glowing, evoking reverence, they demanded their own space. And they were truly beautiful, scars, pootchy stomachs, and all.
Another story that sticks in my mind is from David Sedaris' memoir, Naked - the chapter in which he recounts the time he spent in a nudist camp. It took some getting used to, apparently:
I went to the pool this morning and watched as a man removed his colostomy bag and taped a sheet of plastic over the hole before entering the water. I was thinking of how uncomfortable he must feel and turned to see a very old man who walked with a crutch and had no penis. It hadn't been shriveled by the water; he just didn't have one. His testicles were large and hairless, but where the penis should have been, there was only a small cavity. He noticed my staring and said only, “Hot enough for you?”
Okay: now that's naked. I mean, even Jesus had a penis as he entered the waters.
(Nekkid Part Two is here.)
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