Learning to Take off My Shoes

a sermon preached by Tony Lorenzen

at First Parish Church in Weston, MA

Sunday, May 27, 2007

One day this winter, not this past June-u-ary, but after it had started to snow and it was actually winter around here, I went down to Pep’s Gym in the early morning as I usually do before coming to Weston. There was snow on the ground. My sneakers were wet and full of salt and sand for the first time this season. There was the sign on the door:

“After the first snow, please bring a separate pair of shoes for working out.

No working out in street shoes. Thank you. The management.”

Gym owners don’t want you brining in the water and sand, and in the winter – salt- from the streets and sidewalks outside into their gym and onto their floors and equipment. I’ve always understood about the gym and the shoes, but I’ve never been so good at following the rule. And there it was staring me in the face.

“Who the heck did I think I was? How arrogant have I been?” I thought. What was wrong with me? What entitled me to think this rule didn’t apply to me? I was completely and totally ashamed of myself? The man who owned this gym and I were friends. I watched him vacuum his floors and wash his windows, taking care of his business. We played chess after my Saturday workouts. I looked down at my wet, sandy, salty workout shoes. I turned around, walked back to my car, and drove home. I cleaned off my cross trainers, put on my boots, and went back to the gym.

I’d been going to Pep’s Gym for three years and three winters when this happened. Why then? What signal went off? What switch was flipped? Why the epiphany at that moment?

Some people believe and some religions teach that there is a natural and a supernatural world; that the natural world is material and somehow not as divine, sacred and holy as the supernatural world of God (or the gods) and that moments of insight or blessing or grace only happen once in a great while when God (or the gods) decide to intervene.

Others believe (and other religions teach) that there is no separation between the natural and the supernatural, that all existence is one. In this way of seeing, the divine is all around and God’s (or the gods’ or the Goddess’) presence is a constant and the reason it seems so surprising is that we bother to notice, to pay attention.

It may seem strange to you that I had failed to pay attention to such a common courtesy as taking off my shoes, so to speak, but I had. Like many people I had failed to pay attention to something I didn’t want to see or hear. Then my awareness heightened by the weather, my meditation practice, my friendship with they gym’s owner, the fact that I was meeting the Ministerial Fellowship Committee soon, all of the above – combined to snap me to attention.

Moses has an experience like this in this morning’s reading. We can debate if the scene if literal or metaphorical or what the psychiatric community would tell us the DSM-IV says about someone who claims a bush was speaking to him, but that debate would miss the point entirely. Our religious stories tell us something about being human. This story about Moses tells us about waking up to the presence of the divine that is all around us. The poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning described this experience, both for Moses and for us all, when she wrote:

"Earth is crammed with heaven,

and every common bush afire with God.

But only he who sees, takes off his shoes;

the rest sit round and pick blackberries."

Whatever happened to Moses, whatever he witnessed, he began to see the world differently. He didn’t just see a bush, he saw the spirit of the divine. When you see differently, you act differently.

I like to think that it’s no coincidence that the four letter name of God in Hebrew has linguistic similarities to the Hebrew verb to be, so that the name the burning bush gives Moses is, depending on what Biblical foot notes you read, “I am who I am,” or “I am what is,” and so on. I like to believe that Moses came to understand the reality faced by his people and knew the reality of what called him to act on behalf of justice. He didn’t just see people in bondage, he knew he had to do something about it. Those people must be set free. That’s a feeling like being on fire. Being in that space spiritually is being in a sacred place of the heart and the mind. Holy ground is sacred, one takes off one’s shoes.

Moses’ enlightenment came after a time spent alone in the mountains. My guess is that he spent a good deal of that time contemplating the reality of who he was, and reality faced by his people.

Jesus’ closest friends and followers were scared, afraid, and in hiding after the arrest, torture and death of their spiritual guide and teacher. They disappeared from the streets of Jerusalem. Who knows why? Grief? Fear? All of the above? Crucifixion was messy and painful and reserved for people Romans considered political threats to state security. Were they zealots? Political anarchists and revolutionaries? If not, was the message they had been taught, with its political implications worth a revolutionary’s death if they continued to speak in their teacher’s name? These are not simple or surface questions, but matters of deep discernment. It’s no wonder these first members of the Jesus movement gathered to ponder them. They must have spent time alone and together looking inside themselves, surveying the internal landscape, taking a look at the reality of their situation. Then they touched holiness or it touched them. There must have been much stillness before the activity that followed, before they felt themselves afire and saw the world differently, every common bush, every public square ablaze with God, needing a message of good news – justice on behalf of the outcast, love another, take all you have and share it in common, let the one among you without sin cast the first stone.

What would we say today about Moses and the Apostles? Radicals. Religious nuts? The Egyptians and Romans respectively probably would have called them terrorists. Some people would have told them to stick to religion and stay out of politics.

American Zen teacher Robert Aitken responds to this attitude in his book

The Mind of Clover, when he writes, “We have reached the place in international affairs and in local affairs, too where it is altogether absurd to insist as some of my Buddhist friends still do, that the religious person does not get involved in politics. What is political? Is torture political? As a matter of fact, the denial of politics in religious life is itself a political statement.”[1]

Before the external witness, the public action on behalf of what drives us, comes the internal witness; the time to be with oneself necessary to come to awareness of what is.

All too frequently we deny ourselves that time. That time must be scheduled. We must make an appointment to witness what is going on inside ourselves. All too often we want to act first, to jump into the second witness without stopping to witness what is going on within us, to be aware of who we truly are, what truly motivates us, how we truly feel. Many of us have trouble being still. Just sitting. Just being quiet, but it is only in the silence that we can hear the call of our hearts and the voice of the divine and be present to what is. Peter Mayer writes about this in his work “Silence Makes us Pilgrims”:

What if the highest destination

of any human life

Was not a place that you could reach if

you had to climb

Wasn’t up above like heaven

So no need to fly at all

What if to reach the highest place

you had to fall?

We use the term “enter into silence” often in the praying business. Peter Mayer has us see it differently. He suggests we have to fall into the silence. I like that image because it suggests letting go or dropping. Most of us do not go gently into silence. We are ready to bear witness to many things, but less ready to do the hard work of witnessing what is going on inside of us and really stopping to see things as they are. Things as they really are, on the inside and on the outside, just might scare the living daylights out of us – and we don’t like the prospect of that. Instead of recoiling from what is, perhaps we can learn to bear witness to what is going on inside us, recognize that as a sacred space, a holy place, and take off our shoes.

There are many ways to witness what’s going on inside us. My practice is zen meditation. In zen practice you bow before entering the zendo, or meditation hall. You also bow before sitting on the meditation cushion. Yet, before sitting, before entering the zendo, you take off your shoes.

Some people find it very difficult to witness what is going on inside of them. The first step is to stop. When I used to teach meditation and mindfulness to high school students I would begin by telling them that for today’s class we would be doing nothing. “All right!” They would exclaim as they proceeded to turn on my CD player and talk to their friends. I’d let this go on for 15 minutes or so and then sit in the middle of the room and begin meditating. Eventually someone would ask me, “What are you doing?”

“Doing? I am doing nothing,” I would say. “I am very good at it. You on the other hand don’t know anything about doing nothing. I will have to teach you.”

Some of the students couldn’t sit still for five minutes when they began meditating. It’s difficult sitting still and bearing witness to yourself. Everything that you want to see and think about your life and your world and that you don’t, you will see and think about.

I don’t think Moses saw every common bush afire with God all of a sudden. I think he practiced. I think he paid attention. I think he spent time listening. Most religious traditions have a meditative tradition; it’s not just the Buddhists. In the Christian tradition there is contemplative prayer and the practice of being with God, just listening. This is a different way to look at praying. Prayer is usually associated with petition and with words. But in order to hear what’s going on, you have to stop talking.

I think Jesus’ friends spent a lot of time contemplating and listening, too. I don’t believe those tongues of flame magically or supernaturally appeared above their heads. I do believe that fire was felt in their hearts and they knew they had to speak.

Deliberately and consciously paying attention leads to a change in behavior. Bearing witness leads to bearing witness. Seeing what is, how can we remain the same? Moses saw what was and set a people free. Jesus’ followers saw what was and proclaimed the good news. What will you see if you take off your shoes and to what will you bear witness?

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[1] Aitken, Robert The Mind of Clover: Essays in Zen Buddhist Ethics. San Francisco: North Point Press, 1984. P. 20.