Sometimes, it’s easy for me to go to confession. I’m not that embarrassed to confess anything on my conscience. I do my best to be vulnerable and honest in my examination. I am direct and concise in naming my failures to love God and others—at least those that I am aware of.

 

But sometimes it’s not so easy. Sometimes it feels like I’m, well, naked. Like I’m sitting completely exposed before another human being and before God, warts and all, totally vulnerable. No wonder Adam and Eve hid from God after they sinned. Just moments before, they “were both naked yet they felt no shame” (Genesis 2:25). Now it was a different story and they hid behind fig leaves. We live in that same story.

 

In The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, C.S. Lewis paints a powerful picture of what it sometimes feels like to confess those sins and shortcomings that cause us deep shame. Eustace was a boy who, out of greed, traded his innocence to steal a dragon’s treasure. When he awoke, he found himself covered in dragon skin (a not-so-thinly veiled reference to Adam and Eve’s fig leaves). Ashamed of what he did, he tried repeatedly to peel off the skin, but to no avail. Whatever parts he tore off grew right back. Finally, Eustace came to Aslan, the lion who is Lewis’ representation of Jesus in these Chronicles of Narnia:

 

Then the lion said—but I don’t know if it spoke—“You will have to let me undress you.” I was afraid of his claws, I can tell you, but I was pretty nearly desperate now. So I just lay flat down on my back to let him do it.

The very first tear he made was so deep that I thought it had gone right into my heart. And when he began pulling the skin off, it hurt worse than anything I’ve ever felt. The only thing that made me able to bear it was just the pleasure of feeling the stuff peel off. You know—if you’ve ever picked the scab of a sore place. It hurts like billy-oh but it is such fun to see it coming away…

Well, he peeled the beastly stuff right off—just as I thought I’d done it myself the other three times, only they hadn’t hurt—and there it was lying on the grass: only ever so much thicker, and darker, and more knobbly-looking than the others had been. And there was I as smooth and soft as a peeled switch and smaller than I had been. Then he caught hold of me—I didn’t like that much for I was very tender underneath now that I’d no skin on—and threw me into the water. It smarted like anything but only for a moment. After that it became perfectly delicious and as soon as I started swimming and splashing I found that all the pain had gone from my arm. And then I saw why. I’d turned into a boy again.

 

What a striking image of sin and grace! We cannot simply clean ourselves up as we wish we could; we need a savior to do the deepest work in us.

 

I truly resonate with this story. It’s exactly how confession feels at times. A bit scary. A bit painful. A bit vulnerable. But ahh, the “delicious” love of God that conquers all and leads to freedom! “Perfect love drives out fear” (1 John 4:18). We all have some hardened layers from the wounds of sin. We all need to let God undress us sometimes. Standing before him naked and without shame, we can rediscover the riches of his love and our deepest identity as his beloved children. We can become ourselves again.

 

André Lesperance is a Content Creator and Ministry Consultant at the Evangelical Catholic. The Evangelical Catholic’s mission is to equip Catholics to live out the Great Commission. Learn more.

 

Read More Like This