It might be wonderful to have Frederick Buechner over for a meal. His book “Whistling in the Dark” is a dictionary of topics that we often don’t want to talk about at The Table. Here are some sections from “Nakedness” taken from the second creation story in Genesis:
“Everybody knows what everybody else looks like with no clothes on, but there are few of us who would consider going around in public without them. It is our sexuality that we’re most concerned to hide from each other, needless to say, although one sometimes wonders why . Males and females both come with more or less standard equipment… It started, of course, with Adam and Eve. Before they ate the apple “the man and his wife were both naked, and were not ashamed”…Genesis 2:25, 3:7…. “they sewed leaves together and made themselves aprons”. In other words, part of knowing Evil as well as Good was to know sex as a way of making objects of each other as well as a way of making love, and we have all felt guilty about it ever since….People go around dressed to the nines and we go around undressing them. Again one wonders why. It’s not just to see their bodies surely. We already know what those look like. If our most abandoned fantasies came true and we were actually to have our way with the bodies that attract us most, I suspect it wouldn’t even be that either. We already know just what bodies can do and what they can’t. Maybe our hunger to know each other fully naked is in the last analysis simply our hunger to know each other fully. I want to know you with all your defenses down, all your pretenses set aside, all your secrets laid bare. Then maybe I will be brave enough to lay myself bare so that at last we can be naked together and unashamed.” (from pp 90-91)
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