Tuesday, 26 July 2011
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Barefoot Theology
I succumbed and bought those five-fingered toe shoes - the ones that make you look like you're wearing gloves on your feet?And now I can barely stand regular shoes - either I'm barefoot or in those ridiculous things. I expected that they'd stretch my calves and feet - I had no idea that they'd stretch my theology. I'd heard of "discalced" monks and nuns - religious orders that insist upon no shoes. I'd thought it was maybe something about humility, about obvious poverty. And maybe so.
What I notice though is that I want to leave roads and sidewalks behind. I want to feel the ground beneath my feet, rocks and sticks and earth and grass. To be separated from Creation by so many layers of humanity feels now deeply wrong inside me - bouncy plastic soles of sneakers, clacking high heels, squishy flipflop rubber - all seem like vanity - and protection from the strips of concrete and hot asphalt we've sealed our earth in. I don't want to put my feet on so much deadness anymore.
To walk now, to be conscious of each step, leg, foot and hat beneath each step - is a reminder of holiness - and of what we were given - and how we've turned from it, again and again.
"Remove the sandals from your feet, for the place on which you stand is holy ground." Exodus 3:5
How has the simple changed you and revealed more about God to you? Does God work in the simple, as well as the complex?
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- From: gayXianmom@xanga
- Name: gayXianmom
- About Me: Love is the answer - at least to most of the questions in my heart... ~Jack Johnson
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Comments (7)
I had this revelation after an acid trip in the woods.
There is surely something divine about being able to really touch the forest floor, like you truly trust and enjoy it, rather than protect yourself against it. Every woodland area is more Eden than people expect, soft and safe with food, water, supplies, comfort. And humans? We fit seamlessly into that food chain and ecosystem--again, a lot more than people expect.
You observed something I imagine not many people notice: We don't wear shoes to protect us from Nature, we wear shoes to protect us from the gravel and concrete we attempt to conquer Nature with.
I'm glad you went through this, hopefully it'll be a good half-step to being barefoot entirely. =) It's an easier way to live. Now I just carry around flip-flops in my backpack so I can enter restaurants.
i want a pair of these... where did you find them?
Good post....... and yay for being barefoot!
I think there is an old Cherokee saying, "You won't learn anything if you cannot feel the earth beneath your feet."
Our father in Heaven is the simple, hence the saying of Jesus, thank you father for showing the children what the learned have forgotten, and they way to excel in Heaven is to enter as a child.
Only man in his feeble attempts to understand the simple makes it complex. Example: In order to rationalize us committing murder, we say God kills too so we have justification. But you and I know love does not murder, right?
when i was studying acting in college, one of my professors was big on our feet being bare during class. part of it was the southeast asian idea that when a place is special, you don't wear shoes, because shoes make it dirty. the other part of it was that you get a different sense of a scene when you can imagine how the ground feels on your feet. she would reiterate again and again that people in shakespeare's day would have a hardness to their bodies that we don't, and the ground wasn't smoothly paved like ours. then she also said one day there was a theatre tradition in which the gods are in the stage, and you become a channel to bring them out through your body to the audience.
Don't you get gravel and things in your shoes? I do, when I wear my Vibrams anyplace other than a sidewalk.