The Bare Reality

As kids, we learned that one of the descriptions for the state of nakedness was “to be in your birthday suit.” It was an obvious reference to the literal day of our birth: we were naked coming into this world. All our following birthdays we have probably been clothed. There is a whole lot of acquisition of personal possessions all our lives, but we bring nothing with us arriving on that first day.

One reference in Paul’s correspondence to the church leader, Timothy, touches on this image and expands it. Paul emphasizes the value of godliness. He mentions how possessiveness, competitiveness, jealousy, quarreling, and slander lead us away from God and into a whole lot of trouble. He states that these are typically traps for people, in which their reasoning powers atrophy and their grip on the truth is lost. These behaviors complicate our lives, when in fact we need very little. Paul reminds Timothy that we bring nothing into the world; for that matter, we cannot take anything with us when we leave. Here is the broader statement from the Epistle:

There is great gain in godliness combined with contentment; for we brought nothing into the world, so that we can take nothing out of it; but if we have food and clothing, we will be content with these. But those who want to be rich fall into temptation and are trapped by many senseless and harmful desires that plunge people into ruin and destruction. For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil, and in their eagerness to be rich some have wandered away from the faith and pierced themselves with many pains.  (1Timothy 6:6-9)

Where he is heading with all of this is that our chief need is to love God. That is the simple need and purpose of our lives. Every greedy and insecure tendency to which we so naturally stoop takes away from this pure purpose. Here is Paul’s following thought: “The love of money is the root of all evil things, and there are some who in reaching for it have wandered from the faith and spiked themselves on many thorny griefs.” (1Timothy 6:10 NEB)

Each day, it is worth our figuring out how we can stick with the love of God, expressed in our kindness to other people, and our kindness to ourselves and the creation. We also cultivate the love of God in our life of worship and prayer. Nearly everything else is distracting and destructive. Loving things in a covetous way leaves us empty. Stripping our efforts down to the love of God rewards beautifully.

The bare reality is, God is Being itself who brought us into being. We exist only in the Creator. Our greatest pleasure comes from honoring the Holy One. All the wrangling we do with other people comes to nothing. We dress up our lives with all kinds of empty distractions when we should dress our lives in a birthday suit.  By God, we came into this world with nothing. We take nothing out of this world, yet, to be sure, we go to the One who has been with us every step. To borrow a phrase from the fourteenth-century mystic, the author of The Cloud of Unknowing, our one quest in this life should be for naked love. It is love not dressed up with modifiers of human reason and language. Connection to God comes from this.