Scripture tells us, “God sewed together clothes for them out of the skins of animals and they put them on” (3:21). Surely this is a promise from a protective and nurturing God who takes away their shame and self-loathing. That will become the momentum-building story of the whole Bible, which gradually undoes the common history of a fearsome and threatening deity. God takes away the shame we have by giving us back to ourselves—by giving us God! It doesn’t get any better than that. Human love does the same thing. When someone else loves us, they give us not just themselves, but, for some reason, they give us back our own self, but now a truer and better self.
—from the book Things Hidden: Scripture as Spirituality
by Richard Rohr, OFM
