Sacramental Life: Take Off Your Shoes! by Bro. David Steindl-Rast O.S.B.

Unless Moses had been taking care of the sheep, he never would have come upon the Burning Bush.

[Cont. from page 1] ... "He dwells (all of Him dwells) within the seed of the smallest flower and is not cramped: Deep Heaven is inside Him who is inside the seed and does not distend Him. Blessed be He!" (note 3). ''For a second you see -- and seeing the secret, are the secret!" (note 4). You are the secret because you are seeing it with the eyes of your heart. No other eyes can see it. But being centered in our heart means being together -- with ourselves; together with God, who is always closer to me than I am to myself, together in community with all.

For this reason sacramental life always unfolds in community, together. It is never a private affair, though it is deeply personal. Sacramentality is the secret that in our great Earth Household all communicate to all, in a myriad different ways, the life of the Holy One in the midst of us. The many communities, churches, communes, are merely pointers toward that one great family of God, more or less successful models and partial realizations of it. Their celebrations of life are somehow sacraments, because life itself is sacramental.

Rightly understood the sacraments of the Christian churches are not self-contained boxes conveying divine grace. They are focal points of that divine fire which makes all life sacramental. It is hard to imagine someone truly understanding the Lord’s Supper, for instance, without having learned to look with the eyes of the heart at the robin gulping down an earthworm to feed her young in the nest. The universal law that life must give its life to feed new life simply mirrors the surpassing mystery that through God’s love we have life -- God’s life -- by the very death of God. This mystery of the Eucharist comes into focus whenever a community shares a meal mindfully, gratefully.

Biblical tradition (Jewish, Christian, Islamic) sees with particular clarity that sacramental life is realized in time, in history. This is how the Rabbis put it: unless Moses had been taking care of the sheep, he never would have come upon the Burning Bush. Unless we serve life, in the give and take which this involves on all levels, we shall never discover its sacramental power. That togetherness in which sacramental life is rooted includes the dimensions of time, of history, of struggle, of suffering, of service. Moses not only came upon the Burning Bush in the midst of his daily work as a shepherd, but this vision compelled him to struggle for the liberation of his people.

There is only one condition for seeing life sacramentally: “Take off your shoes!” Realize that the ground on which we stand is holy ground. The act of taking off our shoes is a gesture of thanksgiving and it is through thanksgiving that we enter into sacramental life.

Going barefoot actually helps! There is no more immediate way of getting in touch with reality than direct physical contact. To feel the difference between walking on sand, on grass, on smooth granite warmed by the sun, on the forest floor; to let the pebbles hurt us for a while; to squeeze the mud between our toes. There are so many ways of gratefully touching God’s healing power through the earth. Whenever we take off the dullness of being-used-to it, of taking things for granted, life in all its freshness touches us and we see that all life is sacramental. If we could measure our aliveness, surely it is the degree to which we are in touch with the Holy One as the inexhaustible fire in the midst of all things.

-- Br. David Steindl-Rast

1. Don Johnson, The Protean Body, A Rolfer's View of Human Flexibility (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), p.129

2. Eugene O’ Neil, A Long Day’s Journey into Night), Act 4.

3. C.. S. Lewis, Perelandra (New York; Macmillan 1947), p. 230.

4. O’Neil, op.cit.

Reprinted from Warm Wind: The Chinook Learning Community Journal (Volume II, 1979, Number 1).