Transparency. A decade ago it meant a flexible plastic sheet with multi colored data projected on the wall. Now it is the buzz word for an absence of guile. Administrators expound on their transparent policies. Politicians promise transparent spending. There is increased emphasis placed on peeling away the blinders that keep others from seeing our actions.
One of the subplots of marriage is transparency.
They were both naked, the man and his wife, and were not ashamed.
Another way it is couched is in the word know.
Adam knew his wife and she conceived.
Genesis 4:1
I wonder at the roller coaster of privacy standards that stalls and screeches through the human timeline. Babies are immune to bashfulness. A toddler would no more balk at playing on the beach naked than the seagull she was chasing would blush about his feathers. Gradually preschoolers ease into the concession of nudity at home but clothes at the grocery store. Then skittishness wraps a corset around puberty, and some teens suddenly swaddle their torsos in towels just to get from the
bathroom to their bedrooms, where they lock the door. Yet other teenagers have trouble covering more than three percent of their bodies when they go swimming. Adulthood brings its own stages of modesty. In theory anyway bare bodies are the exclusive domain of a select few... your spouse and your physician. But we all know how well the media has splintered those particular mores. I am not yet privy to the privacy of the elderly, as I am still a spry 64.
Marriage is intended to be an oasis from shame. Even an unphotoshopped view of our freckled and lumpy bod is meant to be safe from ridicule or comparison. The person who is in the best position to find fault... doesn't. At least that is what we yearn for.
Then a subtle shift takes over. Time whittles down the fit and flabless twenty something year old physique, replacing it by stages with an older model. Wattles appear in inconvenient places. Hair once rich with melanin gives up the ghost and sighs into shades of snow.
Yet there is One who has seen us all along. God knows our wrinkles and limping gait, our visible actions and our invisible intentions. There is no velvet curtain to obfuscate our behavior from Omniscience. He is watching our life's drama, but not from the cheap seats. He who is in the best position to find fault... doesn't.
Still there will be a new transparency on the far side of death. We will, perhaps for the first time, see ourselves with the panoramic depth of a falcon soaring in an Alpine sky.
