GOOD AND BAD NAKED

When a voluptuous blonde with extensions sauntered toward me after a show two years ago I had no idea I was about to learn something. Her breasts sat high enough to threaten air flow, her heels elevated her to over six feet, and her glittered nails stabbed out of long tight sleeves like diamond studded knives. She stretched out her slender hand, broke into a blinding bleached smile, wrapped her other arm around my shoulders and leaned in close for a picture. She smelled good. I signed her CD and answered her questions while something inside me radioed for help, "SOS, something's not right here. Be afraid." And I was.

She handed me her business card. "Stripper for Jesus" it said in large glittery letters that matched her nails and heels and belt. "Paul said that after you find Jesus you should go on with the way of life you were in before so you can spread the Good News to those people you hung out with before you got saved. If you're a plumber you should keep being a plumber you know? Well, I was a stripper so I'm putting it to good use," she explained.

I stood spellbound, my head aimed in her direction but my eyes occasionally casually searching the room for a hidden camera or a giggling friend peaking out from behind a fern in a corner, taking the whole awkward scene in with great pleasure.

Then there's my Republican/NRA/"Growing Kids God's Way"/Southern Baptist friend who, with equally admirable intentions, gets dressed in the dark so that she won't tempt her husband needlessly. She listens only to the bible on CD, teaches her kids that other four year olds who hit do so because they need Jesus, has to find a way to interject "Jesus" blatantly into every conversation and situation and believes that if a conversation or situation cannot be Jesus-ed then it shouldn't be participated in in the first place. If there is not an obvious and intended "Christian message" to a night of fun or a movie or a book she wants no part of it.

The stripper believes Jesus sets no limits for Christians because all things are pure to the pure. My Baptist friend seems to think that some things are plastered with bold faced "THIS IS A JESUS THING" labels and that only those things are safe and everything else is dangerous. If you can't read the label just avoid it, better to be safe than sorry - she says. One lives in a world without walls, the other in a world without windows.

And I see the stripper and the Baptist both when I look back upon my life - or even back upon the last few days. We probably all do. And then, realizing I have both of these people taking turns at the wheel inside my psyche, I'm driven to decide which one to hand the keys to. Which one is good and which is bad? Which should I let take over?

Then I think about being naked. I think about men with pockets full of ones sitting at darkened tables masturbating to nakedness. I think about the fertilizer nakedness in that place douses onto the seeds of reckless infidelity and base self-centeredness in every human heart present. Then I think of my honeymoon, of any night of my married life for that matter, my wife able to stand unashamed and naked before me, me before her, of how sex in that place feels like holy communion, rapturous, selfless and soul intertwining.

Then I think about Halloween. Every year evangelicals fight about it on my message board and at my concerts. The question is inevitably asked, "Shaun, is Halloween bad?" And I think that's a bit like asking if naked is bad. Depends why you're naked doesn't it? In the words of the great prophet Jerry Seinfeld "There's good naked and there's bad naked." Isn't that true?

We need walls sure, but we also need windows. The question I'm asking myself isn't whether Halloween or anything else is good or bad, but rather I'm asking "Do I have enough windows in my life to keep my faith from growing mold and dying" and "Where did this wall come from exactly?"