Vachon Imagined

My boyfriend at the time and I were visiting Spain when we came across a nude beach.

He was Puerto Rican, and respect was one of the highest values in his world. In his mind, allowing either of us to be nude in public felt disrespectful. Thankfully, I agreed. A woman who would later become a bodybuilder and spend much of her time wearing very little felt differently in this setting.

Ah, the complexities of being human.

To bare everything felt wrong. Or to borrow an old word, sinful.

Not because of the body itself, but because it would have exposed something deeper. It would have revealed my insecurities—not only about my body, but about myself.

Yet over the years I have come to believe that nudity is essential in a spiritual sense.

Enlightenment, peace, freedom, and genuine power are impossible without it.

Not physical nudity, but the willingness to stand before yourself without excuses, without masks, without the stories that explain away your suffering.

Before a person can know truth, they must first be honest about who they are.

They must recognize that the noise in their mind is not simply “the world.”

It is their world.

Their thinking.

Their fears.

Their judgments.

Their hopes.

God seeing God.

You seeing yourself.

This is where true nudity begins.

This is where vulnerability is born.

And if you remain present long enough, if you stop running long enough, spiritual nudity becomes a way of life. Eventually it transforms the physical one. The inner and outer cease fighting each other because they were never separate to begin with.

They are inextricably linked.

But until a person is willing to know themselves, they will continue casting others into the fires of their own making, believing they are condemning someone else while never realizing they are holding that same flame in their own hand.

They are bound to the very thing they reject.

This is why confession, truth, honesty, and vulnerability have always traveled alongside redemption.

Why humility feels so much like victory.

Why surrender feels so much like freedom.

Until one is willing to stand naked before oneself, one is alive but not fully living.

Alive, but absent.

Present in body, elsewhere in spirit.

Perhaps that is the only real sin there is.

The refusal to be here.

The refusal to see.

The refusal to know oneself.

I cannot say I will be stepping onto a nude beach anytime soon.

But what I do know is that nudity—in every sense of the word—is the way home.

The way back to yourself.

The way back to truth.

The way back to God.

God appearing as you, looking at you.

And you, finally, having the courage to look back.