Barefoot Freedom

The thoughts that go along with these feet are in the article below.

Barefoot Freedom Revisited

This week we heard that a good friend of my husband David’s has been diagnosed with breast cancer. With tears on his face he asked me how it is that we are celebrating our new life together while a friend is in such agony in her journey. We spoke of how life holds out to us the pain and the joy together. Henri Nouwen wrote well on this subject in his little book Can You Drink the Cup. He suggests that we must hold both together in our own cup of life and hold it up to celebrate it all.

This morning my husband woke me early to show me how the room was bathed in moonlight and it was a glorious moment, a deeply contemplative moment. As I headed downstairs to sit quietly and wait for the day to be birthed I read the first chapter of Mark – Jesus was all about everyday life and the healing in it. Leaving the Church, a great book by Barbara Taylor Brown, had a line in it (pg 97) “Since true bliss is never more than a hair away from sorrow I learned not to cling to such mornings”. All of these details in this one morning caused me to turn my thoughts again to my life theme of “Barefoot Freedom”.

Walking in bare feet is not easy as our feet are extremely sensitive to temperature, texture, terrain, and the smallest article under our feet can be felt. At least my feet are very sensitive and I have a terrible time standing on uneven terrain without shoes. It has become the symbol of freedom for me; the ability to walk through life with little between my soul and living so that I may feel the joy as much as the sorrow, the pain as much as the celebration and that my heart may hear the truth in words and tears.

In the 9 months David and I have known each other we have experienced such joy in getting to know each other, falling in love and now being married and sharing life. Also in that period of time he has buried his father, a close friend and a cousins’ child (age 11) have died and now a woman my age is facing the battle with breast cancer. My friend, Angi, writes here of her journey with physical pain, and I see my parents aging more rapidly than they should. Yet this tension of living in the celebration and the mourning once again calls me to consider how truly I am living in the freedom of feeling it all with little or nothing between my soul and my heart so I truly listen to both.

Approaching the stage in the centre of our labyrinth where we were to be married I knew I was coming to holy ground. This was a place I wanted to stand with the soul of my feet touching the earth in that walk. The vows to love, to honor, to journey forward as David’s wife also meant, for me, that I would be doing that in barefoot freedom. It is the challenge to live out fully who I am as the Almighty sees and knows me while learning to live with a heart that becomes more like Jesus.

Barefoot freedom holds for me the call to obedience – the call to live, really LIVE life with all that I am knowing that the Light and the dark times both hold Holy Presence, and I must constantly come to that place. This morning I realize that the Spirit is again bringing this call to my attention. I have been caught up in the details of moving my “stuff” into our house and both of us have too much “stuff” for this small space. I don’t do well in clutter and chaos as my husband has observed! I have been letting the “stuff” cling to my soul and get in the way of celebrating moments like being bathed in moonlight, watching the birthing of a new day, or sitting with the pain of life. My metaphorical “work boots” were not what the Spirit has called me to walk in! My bare feet need to feel the earth, to feel life, to feel this season change with all it brings and my heart looks at my own cup of life this morning and holds it out to the Almighty with a grateful heart.

Weekly Merton Reflection

The Merton Reflection for the Week of September 24, 2007

When people are truly in love, they experience far more than just a mutual need of each other's company and consolation. In their relations with each other they become different people: they are more than their everyday selves, more alive, more understanding, more enduring... They are made over into new beings. They are transformed by the power of their love.
Love is the revelation of our deepest personal meaning, value and identity. But this revelation remains impossible as long as we are the prisoners of our own egoism. I cannot find myself in myself, but only in another. My true meaning and worth are shown to me not in my estimate of myself, but in the eyes of the one who loves me; and that one must love me as I am, with my faults and limitations, revealing to me the truth that these faults and limitations cannot destroy my worth in the eyes of that one who loves me; and that I am therefore valuable as a person, in spite of my shortcomings, in spite of the imperfections of my exterior "package." The package is totally unimportant. What matters is this infinitely precious message which I can discover only in my love for another person. And this message, this secret, is not fully revealed to me unless at the same time I am able to see and understand the mysterious and unique worth of the one I love.

Thomas Merton. "Love and Need" in Love and Living. Naomi Burton Stone and Brother Patrick Hart, editors. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1979: 31.

The First Dance

Just about to take our first dance....the continuing steps into the dance of married life!