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This piece is familiar to some of you, but it is so beautiful and it expresses what this issue is saying so well that I think you’ll enjoy reading it again in this context. If you’ve never read it, well, this is your chance.
editor
Somewhere along the road of life, by the grace of God, my soul awoke. And it was hungry, hungry for God.
And its hunger became a fire, a fire that consumed me and ate me up with its intense, devouring heat. I could not rest anywhere except in motion, that long, endless journey that every soul must undertake if she is to meet her God.
It is a strange journey, across arid plains and verdant valleys, across dried parchment-like deserts. A journey of many crossroads and endless sharp turns that confuse us and make us clamour for a rest.
But the hunger for God knows no rest. So I go on and on and on.
Yes, it is a strange journey, that slowly makes me shed all the baggage I took for it, which I took before I knew that it was too heavy a load for this kind of a journey. I don’t know where I left it. Somewhere back there by some crossroad.
Now I am baggageless, but somehow still too heavily burdened. My hunger drives me on. But now, for speedy travelling, it demands that I must start shedding my clothing.
There on this stone I must lay the cloak of selfishness that kept me warm. It is cold without it, but I can walk faster, as my hunger urges me to.
Here on this branch, I must hang my dress of self-love and compromise with the world. I shiver now in earnest, but my feet seem to have wings. Yet this sheltered rock begs for my underwear.
Slowly, reluctantly, I shed one by one my undergarments. Here goes self-indulgence. Tidily, next to it, I lay greed for possessions and love of ease and comfort. Next, not so tidily, go helter-skelter all the things in me that are not God’s.
Lord, behold I stand naked before thee, with wings on my feet. With wings on my feet. Now my journey inward will be swift.
But it is not. For I still stumble and fall and walk haltingly, inches instead of miles. While the hunger for God flays me and urges me to make haste.
Oh, I had forgotten the shoes, the heavy, comfortable shoes that have shielded my feet. Shielded my feet from the cutting stones, from the sharp pebbles. I must unlace my shoes, my comfortable stout shoes. The last covering of my naked soul. The last stronghold of my non-surrender to God.
I hesitate. The narrow path upward is so hard. It has so many sharp stones. So many knife-edged pebbles. But the hunger for God flames in me, a furnace of fire unquenchable, the fire of love, of passionate, utter love of God.
I must go on, on that journey inward that alone will bring me face to face with him for whom I hunger constantly, without ceasing.
Quickly I bend; with hasty, clumsy fingers, I unlace one shoe, then the other. My eagerness is becoming part of my hunger. Recklessly I throw one shoe this way, the other that, not caring where they fall.
And now I am free. I am free and naked, and my feet have huge wings, huge wings that carry me across the sharp stones and the knife-edged pebbles without harm. Now brambles and thorns that edge the path open up and point the other way.
I am a naked soul, free and untrammelled, driven by the hunger of my love for God, driven by my love for God, on and on, on this journey inward.
I did not know it was going to be so easy, now that I shed all my garments. But now I know, for my hunger is being assuaged, satiated, filled, even as I fly on my winged feet along the steep path upward.
It is being filled, that hunger of mine, so much so well, that I can feed others with the surplus of the food given to me so abundantly.
God meets the soul that starts on its journey inward half way, provided the soul driven by its hunger of love for him strips itself naked.
That is the secret of his love and of his kingdom that begins even on this earth. But the price, I repeat, is nakedness complete, even unto discarding shoes.
From Journey Inward, (1984), pp.xi-xii, Alba House, out of print
