Friday, Day 13: Shoes

Every year in late August, my mother and I went shopping for three pairs of shoes: tennis shoes, school shoes, and church shoes. I have a really narrow foot that made it nearly impossible for me to find shoes that fit well. We often had to buy shoes way beyond our family’s budget. Looking back, I wonder why the church shoes—usually patent leather shoes with buckles—were so important.

But it was simply unheard of to wear pants or “school shoes” to church. We had to dress up. My dressy shoes were relatively comfortable, in retrospect, but they always felt less comfortable than the other two pairs.

As soon as I got home from church, I’d take off my church shoes. If the weather was nice, I'd immediately go out and run barefoot in the grass. I loved the feel of the grass against the bottoms of my feet—a little ticklish, a little scratchy—a feeling that made me sure I was deeply and completely alive.

If you are around my age, you may remember the boy who lived in a giant bubble. I’m ashamed to say I don’t remember his name, and I'm not sure what became of him. What I remember are the images we saw again and again of the giant bubble in which he lived because he could not be exposed to the atmosphere. In those images, he always looked happy--jumping around, smiling through the see-through plastic-like material at his family.

For some reason, I was fascinated by this boy and read every article I could find about him. In one article, he was asked what he would do if he could do anything. He said, “I would walk barefoot in the grass.” This brought tears to my eyes—it was probably the first time I had cried at something I read on a page, the first time I remember feeling a deep compassion for someone I had never met.

Many religious traditions require the removal of shoes in holy spaces.  In so many places in the Bible, holy people take off their shoes to be in the presence of God. John tells us he’s not even fit to untie Jesus’ sandals. And yet Jesus insists on being baptized by John—and, later, on washing the feet of his disciples shortly before his death.

I have never been part of a tradition that actually practices foot washing during holy week, but a friend of mine whose church does so once sent me an e-mail describing the ritual from her perspective (after I mentioned that the whole idea made me a little uncomfortable).

“We forget about our feet,” she wrote. “We sort of pretend they don’t exist, even though most of us able-bodied folks need them to get around. Feeling someone’s hands on them, slowly washing them—well, suddenly I start to see myself a little differently. Precious. And you know what I want to do when it’s over? Run outside barefoot. My feet feel new and sensitive and in need of contact with the earth.”

When I read those words, I thought of the boy in the bubble, and my patent leather shoes thrown off in the entryway to our house, and I wrote back, “Now I totally get it.”