The Achill Island Essays 8
Take Off Your Shoes
...do I, like Moses, put off my shoes from off my feet? I don't mean my physical shoes, the brown shoes I bought a few months ago in Stanley's in Clifdon. I mean the cosmologies I'm shod in. My head shod, my thinking shod, my talking shod. All of me shod. My feet shod. So shod, I hurt the earth I walk on.
John Moriarty
I've never been big on reading the Bible. What I've learned has been absorbed by osmosis in church, school or at home when I was growing up. But over the past four years one single biblical passage kept emerging in different contexts. It occured so frequently that I feel as though I've been hit over the head repeatedly with a big stick. Rarely was it in a specifically religious context like church. I found it in poetry, in books, and in various meditations. The passage is from Exodus 3:5, the story of the burning bush, where Moses was ordered to take off his shoes because he was standing on holy ground.
If there was ever a first step in approaching the problems of our age, it is to take off our shoes. The act itself is one of humility. It is a gesture of respect for the world and universe in which we live, for the people who are around us, and for God, who created it all.
I'm not talking about walking barefoot all the time (though the actual act of removing one's shoes could have some significant value in a ritualistic context). Taking off your shoes on a -30 degree celcius February day in Saskatchewan would leave you stuck frozen to the ground, which wouldn't be healthy no matter how holy it was. What I'm talking about has more to do with attitude. It's about removing the barriers that insulate us from the people and the world around us. Its about acknowledging their inherent value and, most important, coming into direct contact with people, the world and God.
We spend much of our lives insulated from the world. Our houses, our cars, our communities, even our government institutions and religions have become cocoons that separate us from the world. Within our cocoons we try to fashion our own reality, which rarely reflects what is happening outside. We are out of touch. We project our own versions of reality, our own notions of right and wrong on the outside world. We are unable to see alternative points of view. Our walls shield us from the facts, from the objective reality of the universe around us.
Wearing the jackboots of our ideologies, we are free to run roughshod over the world. We are unaware that with every step, some seedling, some insect, some living being is being crushed under foot. Even if we become aware of the damage we are causing, we are unable to feel it. We carry on because its more important that we reach our own destination than worry about the carnage wrought in our wake.
Taking off our shoes leaves us vulnerable. It forces us to watch carefully where we walk. Every step is carefully placed. We risk being hurt. We risk stumbling. But we are also freed to become part of the world around us, to become connected with it in every way. We notice every stone and thistle, and appreciate every patch of grass. Our journey starts to resemble a dance more than a march.
Throughout history we have seen cases where the arrogance of humanity has led to the wanton destruction of whole races of peoples, the environment, even ourselves. The conquest of the Americas, the Nazi Holocaust, and the carnage in Rwanda and Bosnia are all examples of mankind bootjacking its way through history. What's worse is that in all these cases, the perpetrators felt completely justified in their actions. Shod from birth by their religious and nationalist ideologies, they could not feel the ground beneath their feet.
As individuals, this same arrogance is the cause of family strife, abuse, and the countless addictions on which we have become dependent. Parents are set against children, husbands against wives, brothers against sisters. And worse, we are often set against ourselves, an internal struggle that we mask by becoming alcoholics, workaholics, or drug addicts. When our ideologies clash with reality, we desparately try to make the world conform, even though it often results in our destruction of ourselves and the destruction of the people we love.
In any war between mankind and the world, the world will ultimately win. We may win the odd battle, subduing nature and moulding it to our tastes. But in the long term, nature will prevail. Nature will correct the imbalances we create, even if that requires our extinction as a species. To survive we must become not only partners with nature, but once again become part of nature. This starts by treating the earth we walk on with respect. It starts by opening our eyes and seeing the world as it really is.
What would it mean if we regarded the ground we walk on as holy? It would be difficult to pollute it, to desecrate it, to put up fences to keep others off of it. What would it mean if we regarded the resources we are given, living and inanimate, as holy? We wouldn't waste them, or treat them inhumanely, but would be thankful for them. What would it mean if we regarded the people we encountered as holy? It would be hard to cheat them, to abuse them, to use them, to ignor them. And what would it mean if others regarded us as holy? We would be treated with the respect and be given the opportunities that we think we deserve.
For thousands of years, the command God gave to Moses on the mountain has served as good advice to anyone prepared to listen. Confronting the problems that will face us in the coming decades will require us to connect with the earth and all its inhabitants. It will require us to consider, very carefully, every step we take as individuals, as communities, and as a species. Every step must be carefully placed. It will require us to be acutely aware of the world around us. The world will command our absolute respect and reverence. We will ignore this at our peril.
And before we take another step, we must take off our shoes.
March 1996
About the Photograph: A tiny desert flower, no bigger than a buttercup, blooms on the Altiplano in Bolivia. My wife Carole’s favorite picture.