Like Warm Sun on Nekkid Bottoms - Charles Austen [137]
Two floors down, the pastor was in the tub, naked save for with a washcloth over his crotch, devouring his Good Book.
He was skimming chapters that memory told him contained God’s word about how nudity was bad, evil, or—at the very least— generally frowned upon. But he wasn’t having much luck.
Unfortunately he had the King James Version of the Bible, so his search was taking some time. There were about 104 references to the word ’naked’, and its derivatives in approximately eighty-seven verses of that translation. If he had been reading the New International Version, a translation preferred by many conservative Christians, things would have gone faster. There were only forty-nine references to nudity, and its various forms in forty-seven verses of that version of God’s unalterable word.
The pastor had blown through the first eight verses of Genesis, looking for anything concrete to help him correct that blasphemous woman’s point of view, and it’s perverse, Biblical interpretation. Damn her. Or, rather, darn her.
Genesis 9 told of Noah drunk and naked. Noah passes out, one of his sons, Ham, tells his two brothers about it, and they cover their father’s genitals with a rag.
He glanced down at his crotch.
“All right, then,” he said to himself, and went back to reading.
Noah awakes, and curses Ham’s offspring—presumably because Ham ridiculed his father to his brothers. But Noah isn’t punished for getting drunk and lettin’ it all hang out. God doesn’t even give him a stern reprimand or a time-out.
Amazingly, in what should have been the perfect place to let it fly, there was not one word about an angry God who hates the exposed bodies of His most perfect creations and punishes those who flop around freely.
Pastor Winterly skipped up to Exodus and found Moses punishing the 3,000 men and women, some of who were dancing naked. But he seems to have punished them only for the false idol worship, and not for the dancing naked part. Maybe that verse had been accidentally edited out during the council of Nicaea. Well, then it wouldn’t be official, would it?
Still no help.
Didn’t God ever get righteously angry over the things that truly mattered?
1 Samuel 18. Jonathan gets naked in front of David. No cursing or damning there. The pastor skipped past that passage without a thorough read. It had always made him a little uncomfortable because it could be interpreted to mean that Jonathan leaned a little to the ‘melikey-men’ side.
1 Samuel 19. Saul prophesizes in the nude. Okay, we’re going backward here.
Isaiah 20. God makes Isaiah take off all his clothes, and walk around naked and barefoot for three years.
God made him? What was He thinking?
The pastor closed his book and set it on the sink. He looked into space and thought deeply for a moment. Why was nudity a sin? There had to be a specific reason. A pertinent passage. A footnote.
What was he forgetting?
He removed the washcloth from his lap and laid it carefully over the side of the tub. Then he stared at it for a moment, thinking of his mother. After a moment’s unpleasant reminiscing, he turned and looked at his penis, studying it for a long time.
It seemed…ugly. Withered. Like it didn’t even belong there between his legs and should be removed. A bit of dried flesh, like a leftover umbilical cord that hadn’t completely detached. Or a twig that had become lodged there.
Or a cancer.
Then he flashed on the smiling face of the girl from Toulon and wondered if she would have agreed. Maybe not then.
After too long contemplating the existence of his organ, Winterly stood from the water and stepped out of the tub, toweling himself, lost in thought. As he held the soft cloth to his moistened lips, he lowered his head and continued searching his mind, quietly dripping onto the floor. He felt he was just on the verge of remembering something of significance, but it was too deeply buried beneath the clutter of his mind for him to dig it out.
Making matters worse, disconnected memories of his ex-wife’s complaining had begun to swirl in