Wearing God

Perhaps if I sit inside Genesis 3 long enough, I might come to know that God is not hidden from my body, my body that holds delight and shame.  Perhaps I will come to know that God is in fact intimately pressed up against my body, as near as a camisole or a neon running shirt.  That God is as close to my shame as this shawl is to my shoulders.  That God is pressed up against all the corrosive shame in my life – not just the shame I feel about my body, but all my whatever-else shame, all the many pockets of curdling shame and regret I carry.  While I feel cloaked with shame, God is tenderly stitching me a suit of clothes.  The clothing is God’s own self.

 I suspect that if I could receive this, something small but important would change. I suspect that the way I inhabit myself would be different if my spinning, whirling brain could receive this, if my heart could receive it, if my body could receive it.  If I could know that God wants to nestle up close to the places of my shame, as close as clothing – then the shame would dissolve.  Anything God wants to nestle against is not shameful, so if I actually believed that God wanted to be close to my curdling, the shame would dissolve, and I would be slightly less hidden from God, or from myself.

– Lauren Winner, in Wearing God