Exalted In Your Birthday Suit
The Gospel, butt-nakedness, and transcendence
Sometimes, God makes coincidences happen that smack you in the face and change you. Happy to report it happened to me today.
As a vowed Franciscan, one of my responsibilities is to read the designated Gospel1 for the day and meditate on it. Another one is to be intimately familiar with the biography and timeline of Francis, so that I can use it as a template for daily living.
The closing line of today’s gospel was Jesus’s reminder that
“Whoever exalts himself will be humbled;
but whoever humbles himself will be exalted”. Mtt 23:12
Normally this admonition gives me a chill, for the following reasons:
I often confuse “humbling myself” with self-abasement - always being the one to clean the toilets without complaint, never taking credit for successes, letting the housemates always decide which movie to watch, generally being a doormat. This is pathological.
The word “exalted” makes me think of someone on a pedestal in formal clothing winning some kind of award and that grosses me out. I don’t want that.
After 1.5 years of hard recovery from healthcare burnout, I am terrified that “humbling myself” (bending and stretching to always serve others until I’m scraped out like a pumpkin) will make the burnout happen again. I do not have enough money for this quantity of therapy.
I heard the words differently today, because I remembered a vignette from the life of Francis that illustrated it.
Francis, after his conversion experience, stole and sold his merchant father’s stuff so he could have the money. His father sued him for reimbursement - but of course he had given it all away. As they litigated publicly in the town square, the townspeople, magistrates, clergy, bishops, and old friends in Assisi watched the medieval Jerry Springer fracas with interest.
Francis, because he is like this, tore his clothes off and stood there in front of everyone naked2. He handed over the clothes and the few cents he had to his father, and proceeded to publicly disown him and state that his only father from now on was God.
That wasn’t self-abasement: that was humility. What’s more humbling than standing butt-naked in front of everyone you know, not figuratively but literally? This situation is not an “exalting” one, no matter how gorgeous you are.
When Francis stripped off his clothes, he also stripped off any possibility of people seeing him as some rich guy’s pious son becoming a Hero of the Church. Francis stripped off any chance that people could ever take him seriously as some sort of spiritual potentate, going town-to-town lecturing people about The Kingdom of Heaven. Any chance he may have had for becoming a priest or joining a “respectable” religious order like the Benedictines completely evaporated. He referred to himself from then on as a “fool for Christ”: never again would he take himself seriously. Everyone had seen his giblets and the gossip would spread like wildfire.
This was kenosis, an emptying. Francis poured his self-image out to make room for the illuminations of God. This was exaltation - a skinny, naked guy in his early 20’s pouring out everything, starting a chaotic and beautiful revolution that would turn the Church upside-down forever.
Francis’s kenosis didn’t translate into self-abasement, showy martyrdom, or burnout - on the contrary! Unlike working in healthcare, this self-emptying didn’t scrape him out into a husk. It poured out temporal and spiritual poisons and refilled him immediately with illumination, purpose, and wild passion for the things that truly matter in the end.
Many people think of him today as a “hero of the church,” “visionary,” or “founder,” but I am 100% certain that would be a revolting surprise for him. The Francis I love and follow is a weird, crusty, spiral-eyed wild man with PTSD who wandered out to the farthest edges of Catholicism and came back giggling, singing, and shooting lightening bolts of bright transcendence into the world around him.
Now to my mind, this is “exaltation.” So, for me, humbling myself means something quite different now. But for the moment, my clothing will remain in place thank you very much.
The Catholic Church has a “lectionary”, or assigned series of readings for every day of the year. Usually comprises an Old Testament chunk, a Psalm, and a bit of the Gospel.
Years later, he took all his clothes off again right before he died, and left this world in his birthday suit.