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The Brave Naked Selfie

The Brave Naked Selfie

Last updated on: December 1, 2015 at 8:54 am by Anne Kennedy

The Brave Naked Selfie 2015-12-01T08:54:49-04:00 Anne Kennedy

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I’m not particularly up to date on pop culture/entertainment news. I only know the little that can be gleaned from ten minutes of evening internet scrolling and then coffee hour conversations percolating here and there. Well, and my Tuesday Tea Time for which I try to be up to date on YouTube clips. In the old days my Tuesday Tea Time and I would have talked knowingly about books, but now it’s all Adele and and, well, leave me alone, we are both busy people and are totally going to start reading books tomorrow.

So apparently, some lady I’ve never heard of took her clothes off and had a picture taken in only her undies, holding a cup of coffee. I glanced at Twitter long enough to discover that she is #brave a la #lenadunham #courageousness brave. I had to go away because the pictures and the hashtags got weirder and uglier as I scrolled down.

And that was the interesting wondering thought, for me. Is she ugly? Or is she beautiful? I’m not sure I could know which one based on a naked twitpic. If she is beautiful, does that mean she is brave? And if she isn’t very, um, you know, beautiful, does the bravery of going naked onto the Internet diminish?

I’m inclined to seriously wonder about her actual beauty, whoever she is, precisely because of the use of the word ‘bravery’ being used to describe the business of putting a naked picture of oneself onto the Internet. Back in the day, when words had meaning, bravery was something you achieved by denying yourself something basic–like safety–in the service of another. Nurses going up against infectious disease, like Ebola, used to be the picture of bravery. A soldier going into battle, could be described as brave. A teacher squaring her shoulders and marching into the gaping maw of a classroom full of foul little children who would love to chew her up and spit her out, that would be brave.

But this is a new age. We have passed by these arcane, irrelevant concepts of bravery and courage onto the shining new dawn of the bravery of self expression. True bravery, now, is the placing of oneself into the forefront of the frame, the careful sweeping of the hair, the studied expression, the positioning of the hand aloft, at an angle just so, to catch that perfect and most courageous emblem of our time, the selfie.

This lady, whoever she is, removing her garments and posing with her coffee (in a disposable cup, though! What about the earth! Badly done! Get a lasting coffee cup, made of porcelain!) is trying to do something, say something about herself, and for this attempt, she gets to be described as brave.

I’m not exactly certain that she, and those with her, are so wrong. If you are a very confused person, so confused that you don’t know or understand what the purpose of clothing is, and don’t know what it means to sacrifice yourself for the good of another, and don’t know that your worth doesn’t have to be measured by each moment of self expression, then you are basically wandering around alone in the Land of Unlikeness, the Kingdom of Anxiety. You are not known, either by yourself, or by another. Your identity has to be fixed somewhere, to something. Its malleable, changeable nature means that you can’t ever be sure who you are. The selfie, then, of course, becomes the perfect moment of bravery. For one single second, you can look at yourself and say This is Who I Am. But then you put your phone away and carry on, only to find, a few minutes later, that you have changed and the process must begin again. The more you try to pin in it down, the more it slips away from you.

James, in his epistle, describes a person who looks in the mirror to discover what he looks like but who, when he walks away, immediately forgets what the image was. He describes this person as a ‘hearer’ of the word, but not a ‘doer’. We might say of him that the word ‘went in one ear and out the other’. He didn’t really hear. He listened, but not so that he actually heard. He was scrolling through Twitter and snapping selfies and trying to discover who he might be, all the while not actually seeing, not actually hearing. James gives a curious remedy. The solution to the problem is not to keep looking into the mirror. It is actually to go away from that and look at the perfect Law. Rather than forever looking at the self, you can really only discover who you are by looking at God, whose most perfect expression of himself is, on the one hand, in the law, and, on the other hand, on the cross. You look at the law and discover yourself to be ugly measured up against the beautiful perfection of God. You despair over your ugliness, you look at your heart and your flesh and find the nakedness isn’t brave, but rather shameful, that sin is the substance of all your self expression and that you have no remedy. Then you can look at the cross.

And the cross is interesting because the one who hangs there is naked and ugly. But it is not his own nakedness, his own ugliness. Rather, it is yours. He has taken you onto himself. And then he gives himself to you, he clothes you with his own perfection and beauty. It is the most shocking trade. It is brave, of him, because of its unfairness. He has been completely self sacrificial in order to clothe you, heal you, and give you an identity. So, of course, when you stop looking at yourself and look at him, you can be relieved to find that you are somebody, and that beauty has been appointed for you, inwardly and outwardly. Bravery, for yourself, would be to admit the truth of how it is.

And, I suppose, bravery would be to take this curious and terrifying news to the lost person wandering around looking for some way to be known. And also to pray for the lonely, the naked, and the ugly.

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