"shame and grace" excerpt - l. smedes

But important as clothes are to what we look like, they are more deeply the metaphors of what we are. They are signs of our mystery, and mystery is the sign of a real self:

If we have no privacy, we have no mystery, and if we have no mystery we have no self.

If we have no privacy, we have no depth: we are on the surface, transparent, superficial, shallow, boring.

If we have no privacy, we have no sacredness: we lose our boundaries, and we have no place within that is holy to ourselves. Take away our scaredness, and we lose our core.

If we have no privacy, we lose our identity: it is swallowed in the mass. We do not know who we are even if we are celebrities and everybody on earth knows our name.