This Vocation Reflection was written by Sr. Ita Connery, FcJ, a member of the Faithful Companions of Jesus, who is currently living in Calgary, AB, and ministering at the FCJ Christian Life Centre.
One of the most common things in daily life is walking.
When we cannot walk well we recognize the ability to walk as a grace, a miracle. Each step we take, no matter how small, is a movement toward something.
Karl Rahner writes: “While walking we experience ourselves as those who are changing, as those who are searching, as those who have yet to arrive. We realize that we are walking toward a goal and not simply drifting toward nothingness. We talk about a walk of life, and it is worth noting that the name first given to Christians was “people of the way”.
We walk and we are compelled to search. But the ultimate, the essential, walks toward us, searches for us, yet does so only when we are the ones walking also, walking toward it. And when we have found because we were found, we will know that our walking was supported by the power of that movement that comes toward us, namely the moving toward us of God.”
Karl Rahner: The Mystical way in Everyday Life
Meditating on this passage and the miracle of walking I came across an article titled “Walking with Living Feet” by Dara Horn
Dara is a fifteen year old student who, on a school outing, visited a concentration camp. She writes:
I had a very unusual fifteenth birthday. During my birthday week, the end of April, I was traveling with 5,000 high school students from around the world, visiting concentration camps in Poland. I learned more there than I learned during my entire life in school; once I stepped out of a gas chamber, I became a different person.
Dara goes on to write about just one of her experiences in the camp.
I could not feel, but in that room filled with shoes, my mental blockade cracked. The photographs meant nothing to me, the history lessons and names and numbers were never strong enough. But here each shoe is different, a different size and shape, a high heel, a sandal, a baby’s shoe so tiny that its owner couldn’t have been old enough to walk, and shoes like mine. Each pair of those shoes walked a path all its own, guided its owner through his or her life and to all of their deaths. Thousands and thousands of shoes, each pair different, each pair silently screaming someone’s murdered dreams.
No book can teach me what I saw there with my own eyes! I glanced at my own shoe, expecting it to be far different from those in that ocean of death, and my breath caught in my throat as I saw that my shoe seemed to be almost the same style as one, no, two, three of the shoes I saw; it seemed like every shoe there was my shoe. I touched the toe of one nearby and felt its dusty texture, certain that mine would be different. But as I touched my own toe, tears welled in my eyes as my fingers traced the edges of my dusty, living shoes. Eight hundred and fifty thousand pairs of shoes, but now I understood: they weren’t numbers, they were people.
Dara Horn lives in Short Hills, New Jersey, and is in the tenth grade at Millburn High School in Millburn, New Jersey. She wrote her essay while in the ninth grade.
For our Prayer
Each pair of shoes tells a story, of where we have been and where we long to be.
Where have you been?
Toward what are you walking?
Do you experience God as the One walking toward you?
Was God walking toward and meeting those whose shoes were left to tell a story?
Image credits: Unsplash (image 1) and upcyclemy.stuff.com (image 2)
