Friends, with Georgetown starting back last week, I still can’t quite believe I’m done with university.

I mean, I vividly remember opening my acceptance letter senior year of high school and full on shrieking in the post office,

“I GOT IN!”

My sister, who’d accompanied me, promptly took the letter, gave it a glance, and said,

“Well. I guess they let anyone in.”

🙂

Love you, soph.

Anyways!

With the school year starting afresh, I’ve been reflecting on my time on the Hilltop, and there’s this one incident that happened my very first week of freshman year that still makes me wince.

It was a total Dorothy “You’re not in Kansas anymore” moment.

Full disclosure: my memories of the exact exchange are somewhat hazy (after effects of adrenaline and shock maybe), but I’ve done my best to recapitulate it faithfully 🙂

Allow me to set the scene:

I was walking back from class, sun shining, wind blowing, feeling very much at ease, when, up ahead, I noticed something that literally stopped me in my tracks.

Another girl, walking maybe 20 feet in front of me, was wearing a long, flowy skirt/dress, and when the sun hit, you could see straight—and I mean straight—through it.

Friends, I went from stationary to full on sprint in like two seconds.

I didn’t even have to think about it.

Because I’ve had my fair share of wardrobe malfunctions and were it not for, as Blanche says in A Streetcar Named Desire, “the kindness of strangers” who intervened, I’d probably have both many more and much more mortifying stories.

And thus, I wasn’t about to let another girl waltz towards public humiliation, though, in retrospect, there is every chance I drew more attention to the situation with my Usain Bolt impersonation.

Regardless!

I full on charged, and, when I reached her, I (somewhat) gently grabbed her arm.

She stopped walking and turned towards me.

“Sorry–” I wheezed. “But your dress–it’s see through.”

She blinked, seemingly confused, so I continued, trying to keep my voice low,

“I can see your underwear.” [t’was a thong]

I gestured urgently below.

She sort of cocked her head, brow furrowed, and said, “Yeah. I know.”

…

…

…

Friends.

Freshman Sarah was too stunned to speak.

I could not–for the life of me–comprehend being so blasé about having uncovered buttcheeks.

I mean, we were at university!

Prior to that, there’d only been one time in my life when backsides and academics had coincided, which was when I read Candide in AP European History and Candide’s lady love Cunegonde has a single buttock cut off to feed “very pious and humane men” who otherwise would’ve eaten her in aggregate!

All that to say, I was pretty taken aback.

Caught somewhere between wanting to do the Homer Simpson retreat

And having a heart attack.

I think I said something super intelligent like, “Oh. Okay.”

She turned and continued on her cheeky way.

I walked back to my dorm looking like a paintball gun loaded with a ripe tomato had shot me in the face.

Now, let me be very clear.

I’m no saint when it comes to clothing.

Even in middle school, my fits were known to be… eyebrow raising to say the least.

HOWEVER!

This last year, I read Kazuo Ishiguro’s Remains of The Day, wherein the very refined and restrained British butler/narrator Stevens said something about clothing that has stuck like hubba bubba inside my brain:

“Dignity comes down to not removing one’s clothes in public.”

That, my friends, is a paradigm I haven’t been able to shake.

Dignity comes down to not removing your clothes in public.

Put another way: dignity is about not baring yourself for all to see.

i.e. no cheeky.

Now, intuitively, that makes a lot of sense to me, but it makes even more sense when you consider the etymology of dignity’s opposite:

See, the word shame is believed to be derived from the Germanic skem-/kem– which means “to cover.”

Think Genesis 3 when Adam and Eve, having eaten fruit from the forbidden tree of knowledge of good and evil, hurriedly strap on some fig leaves.

Their shame was on display, and they had to cover up for their sense of dignity to be regained.

Now, things have changed since Adam and Eve’s day.

Telling people they should not take their clothes off in public is actually something of a hot take.

Indeed, the spirit of the age seems to be very much in line with a line from Saint Augustine’s Confessions wherein, referring to his misspent youth, he says,

“I was ashamed not to be shameless.”

It is a simple fact that popular standards of dress have become, in a word, minimalistic.

The task du jour is to be maximally naked.

It’s like a game of clothing limbo.

How low can you go?

What exactly is the required minimum amount of clothes/what is the maximum amount of skin you can show?

And as I was trying to think about how this change came to be, I was reminded of the portion of the Jewish Book of Legends where it describes Abraham saddling his own ass in preparation for going up the mountain with Isaac and says, “Love disregards dignity!”

Love disregards dignity.

Now, that is interesting.

And helpful!

Because, if we grant that Ishiguro is correct–that dignity is about keeping your clothes on–disregarding dignity ostensibly means taking your clothes off.

i.e. it means removing the fig leaves.

And the only instances where that would be necessary would be if you needed to use the facilities OR if you were wanting to… you know.

Yodel in the canyon.

Not to be weird, friends, but we all know there comes a point where taking your clothes off, literally or figuratively, is actually pretty critical for relational intimacy.

I’ve written about this before, but, in brief, to truly love and be loved by somebody, the fig leaves will have to go.

You’re going to have to risk baring yourself because, as C.S. Lewis said,

“To love at all is to be vulnerable.”

However!

Granting that love disregards dignity is correct, when people walk around in all manner of things sheer, short, and suctioned, I have a niggling sense that it is not the Book of Legends/C.S. Lewis love that’s operative.

After all, in both of those cases, the love that disregards dignity is an expression of care for someone else.

As far as I can tell, playing clothing limbo is mainly a celebration of self.

Indeed, nowadays “self-love” is all the rage, and one way it is frequently displayed is by getting maximally naked and having a one-woman/man public parade.

I could write a whole ‘nother blog post about why I’m not a huge fan of that.

But for now, I’ll just say that 1) real love requires two and 2) real love is about honoring the other people in the room.

If you want to still argue that the person you love is, well, you, there’s a great bit of Greek mythology which might help illustrate why self-love is not the move.

Clue:

However!

At the end of the day, if you really want to have a nudist parade, there’s not much I or anyone else can do to stop you.

We’re just going to have to agree to disagree on whether or not everyone should see yo buttcheeks.

BUT!

And it’s a big but!

While we may disagree on when/where it’s a good idea to remove your fig leaves, I think we would all agree that having them ripped off against your will is pretty much always a bad thing.

Even Friedrich Nietzsche (who is not someone I usually agree with) said,

“WHOM DO YOU CALL BAD? Those who always want to put others to shame.”

Put another way, bad guys are the folks who want to forcibly rip other people’s clothes away.

All agree?

Yes!

Great 🙂

However, Nietzsche also claims,

“WHAT IS MOST HUMANE? To spare someone shame.”

That’s a bit more of a nuanced take.

And yet!

If we revisit Adam and Eve in the aftermath of Genesis 3, I think he’s correct!

Because while Adam and Eve had haphazardly patched together some fig leaves to hide their shame, God swoops in and, after chastising them, actually gives them proper clothing.

That is, God did what Nietzsche (who was really not a God-fan) himself said was most humane.

He covered up their shame.

And fun fact!

The animal whose skin God used to clothe Adam and Eve experiences the Bible’s first recorded death.

I think it’s pretty interesting that the first death in Scripture occurred to spare people shame.

But what’s more interesting (and IMO much more important) is that, according to Christianity, the first death in the Bible wasn’t the only one undertaken to achieve that end.

In fact, the most significant death in the Bible–Jesus’–occurred for the same reason!

Friends 🙂

The central claim of the Christian faith is that Jesus Christ–God incarnate–the most humane human to ever live–bore our sin and shame, died, and rose from the grave in order to offer us the free gift of grace.

1 Peter 2:24 states,

“He Himself bore our sins in His body on the cross, so that we might die to sin and live to righteousness; for by His wounds we were healed.”

In light of that, those who (like me!) have put their faith in Jesus get to say as Isaiah 61:10 says,

“I will greatly rejoice in the Lord; my soul shall exult in my God, for He has clothed me with the garments of salvation; He has covered me with the robe of righteousness.”

And make no mistake, friends.

That robe was hecka expensive.

It cost Jesus everything.

His majesty. His might. His life.

His dignity.

I’ve never seen it depicted, but Jesus was actually crucified naked.

His clothes were ripped off, split amongst the men crucifying Him, and He was nailed into place.

God incarnate, forcibly stripped, shamed, and displayed for our sake.

And it wasn’t a mistake.

Revelation 13:8 makes it plain that

“Before the foundation of the world was lain, the Lamb was slain.”

Jesus knew the price of our robe of righteousness from the get, and He was still willing to pay it because as has already been said,

Love disregards dignity.

Or as Hebrews 12:2 says,

“For the joy set before him Jesus endured the cross, scorning its shame, and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God.“

I think that’s pretty neat 🙂

That the King of all creation endured the cross to clothe you and me, erase our sin, and set us free.

That’s all for this week!

If you want to know more about what life with Jesus is like/how He SUPER changed my life, you can poke around here on CC or drop me a line!

Always, always down to talk about Jesus Christ 🙂

I was buried beneath my shame
Who could carry that kind of weight?
It was my tomb
‘Til I met You

I was breathing, but not alive
All my failures I tried to hide
It was my tomb
‘Til I met You

You called my name
Then I ran out of that grave
Out of the darkness
Into Your glorious day