Going Barefoot
Sometimes you see or hear things and you just feel like taking your shoes off because something has made the entire place holy. Such things often are but they don’t need to be overtly religious to fill you with awe (which is always religious in nature). Depending on your background and experience you only have to look at a starry sky or a waterfall or a field of wheat or a tiny baby or the devotion of one human to another and you’re unzipped; life is never the same even though you go back to the “ordinary”. You’ve seen something you can’t unsee, heard something you can’t unhear. A chicken might as well try to get back into the shell it broke out of.
It’s true; sometimes the holy is there and we don’t realise it until later. It’s only when we become sensitive to such things that we realise we’ve seen a burning bush and not just another somewhat interesting occurrence [“yes, that was…um…interesting,” a big yawn and stretch].
Each of us has his/her own moments [don’t we?] though some public domain events can affect us all the same way.
It was only years after she died that I realised this was so about my mother (who bore thirteen of us and raised nine of us to adulthood). I was in the presence of a burning bush and didn’t know it—I was too busy, too young, too something. I should have gone barefoot—I was on holy ground.
The trouble was, I had seen others like my mother (but not at all exactly like her) and I suppose I was used to the sight. Her life wasn’t out-in-the-open different and gob-smacking as Dick Hoyt’s wondrous devotion to his son Rick, but hers was as real and genuine and lasting and, in some ways (the details don’t matter), even more costly. Moses must have seen a lot of bushes burning in that wilderness heat but he’d never seen “a burning bush,” if you know what I mean. There’s was nothing ordinary about this sight on that day and there was nothing ordinary about the presence of God in my mother. Some of you know exactly what I mean for you have seen “a burning bush” and barefoot is appropriate.
©2004 Jim McGuiggan. All materials are free to be copied and used as long as money is not being made.
Many thanks to brother Ed Healy for allowing me to post from his website, the abiding word.com.