Let me start by saying that the walk is still on.
Barring something unexpected, like a car crash or heart attack that takes me completely out of the picture, I’ll be meeting with Friends in Bloomington-Normal (Illinois) on Tuesday, June 13, and with Friends in Urbana-Champaign (Illinois) on Thursday, June 15.
That said, however, I want to add that I’m itching to talk here about something other than updates on my visits with doctors. There really is much more to life, and much more to Quakerism, than that!
I’ve been getting a lot of e-mail (not posted to this blog site) from people who read my postings here. I presume, since it is sent to me personally as e-mail, rather than being posted to this blog site, that the senders don’t want people other than myself to read what they are writing. That’s a shame, because a lot of what they’ve written has been worth sharing. But I feel I need to respect their desires in the matter.
One issue that was brought up, though, in one of the e-mail letters I’ve recently received, seems so much worth exploring here, that I’m going to discuss it even though I cannot show you the letter in which it came up.
It revolves around an earlier letter I had written to my monthly meeting, way back in October when I first felt my leading to walk.
In that letter to my monthly meeting, I wrote:
What I feel called to convey is wrapped up in what early Friends called ‘going naked for a sign’. It’s a matter of making oneself publicly visible, struggling to get by while stripped (‘naked’) of the customary protections, conveniences and tools of prosperity and power. One does this both to dramatize what will happen to people generally if they persist in some wrongful way of living, and also to embody the way of repentance. It’s an old, old practice.
In the prophet Isaiah’s case, he stripped himself of clothes and shoes, reducing himself to rags and bare feet, to signify that the great nations of Egypt and Ethiopia, which his fellow Jews were looking to for protection, were in fact no protection at all, because they were about to be conquered and enslaved. (Isaiah 20:2-3; cf. 30:7.) Isaiah wanted people to reconsider what they were entrusting themselves to. He wanted them to entrust themselves to righteousness and humility, and to the God of righteousness and humility, instead of to the powers of the world.
In my own case, I’d be stripping myself of mechanized transport, comforts and conveniences, to signify that these things, too, cannot ultimately be depended on, given the processes of natural destruction they involve, and the unjustifiability of the assumption that human systems won’t fail. So I’d not only be pointing to the processes of destruction — the slaughter of creatures by vehicles, the consumption of vanishing resources, the build-up of greenhouse gases, and so forth; I’d be inviting people to reconsider what they entrust themselves to, much as Isaiah did.
And that’s a point that cannot well be made by halves. Isaiah didn’t just switch to cheap clothes to make his point, nor would just switching to cheap clothes have worked. He went naked in the sun and rain, and limped barefoot on the stony streets, because that got the message across. And in the same way, bicycling doesn’t make the point of the cross to be borne today, but walking two months to a speaking engagement on the ragged shoulder of the highway in the hot sun and the cold rain certainly does.
The writer of the e-mail letter I recently received wanted to know how I squared these words with the fact that I’ve since accepted rides from passing drivers, and may now be reduced to driving large parts of the route that my feet cannot handle.
I think that’s a very good question! And I suspect that some of you might be wondering something similar yourselves.
Let me begin my answer by saying that, in my humble opinion, the essence of “nakedness” is the fact that the things one would prefer to hide from others cannot be hidden. Anyone who has been caught in any sort of embarrassing undress (such as having an embarrassing stain on your clothing at a party), or in any similar embarrassment that had nothing to do with physical clothing (e.g., the embarrassment of having a lie seen through and the underlying naked facts seen plainly) will know what I am talking about here.
Isaiah’s nakedness was a sign that the fundamental weakness of Hebrew-style holiness — the fact that such a holiness could not save a person from slavery or worse — would soon become obvious to the world. Everyone would be able to see for themselves that the Hebrews’ special relationship with their God could not keep them from defeat at the hands of armies that worshiped other gods, or from desperate suffering afterwards. When followers of other gods taunted them, saying, “What use is your religion, anyway?”, the Hebrews would soon have no easy reply, being enslaved and helpless. Their faith in their God of Justice would look like idiocy. That sort of thing is just as much a state of embarrassing undress as physical nakedness is.
But the immediate sign of this coming embarrassment was not simply that Isaiah was going about without clothes; it was that he was stripped of dignity, comfort and safety. He may have given up his citizen’s clothing willingly in response to his leading, but the fact that it led to third-degree sunburns, and to feet made bloody by walking barefoot over stony paths, could not have been something he savored. His pain and suffering must have been very obvious and very disturbing — something that moved some people to criticize him, but moved many more to want to do something to relieve him.
I myself did not anticipate the fact that, first blisters and chafed hips, and then agonizing ankles and heels, would make it impossible for me to walk as I’d planned. Quite a few people told me in advance that they’d thought I’d have trouble walking the distance I’d planned at the pace I had to keep, but I went by the fact that I’d never had such trouble before. And so I put myself in trouble. I wound up looking — like Isaiah’s people — blind to what I was setting myself up for, and deaf to the warnings of others. I also wound up — like Isaiah himself — in some real agony.
“Naked for a sign”. Can it ever be truly “nakedness for a sign” unless we are stripped even of those defenses that we would never voluntarily give up, and made to look foolish into the bargain?
I am not sure Isaiah would have voluntarily let his feet be lacerated. His giving up sandals must surely have looked to many people around him like idiocy. I suspect, though, that the laceration, and the consequent suffering written across his face, were a great part of the power of his witness.
I myself would never have voluntarily let myself in for the agony I’ve endured this past week-and-a-half. And yet it would not have been such a thorough nakedness, if it had not gone beyond the easy nakedness of walking-instead-of-driving, to the much harder and deeper nakedness of experiencing-pain-I-would-never-voluntarily-have-chosen, and letting my folly and my agony alike become impossible to conceal from everyone around me.
You, dear readers, have yourselves borne witness to the power of that nakedness — that nakedness I would never willingly have chosen for myself, but that I rather set myself up for by my failure to anticipate my weaknesses — with comments you’ve posted here. You’ve said how it has affected you. I’ve been surprised and deeply moved by your comments.
I cannot begin to tell you of all the other people who’ve been affected in similar ways — the people I’ve encountered in the course of my walk, who’ve been visibly opened up to my concerns by the sight of my suffering in my struggle to be faithful. I’m talking here, not just about the Friends I’ve visited along the way, but also about clerks and cashiers in stores where I’ve bought food, staff and guests in motels where I’ve stayed, drivers who’ve pulled over to the side of the road to ask me how I’m doing —
Nor can I begin to tell you of how much that unforeseen suffering — and the revelations of my own ignorance and helplessness that have accompanied it — and my own struggle to remain faithful to my leading despite these things — have affected me personally, breaking down the psychological defenses I’d thrown up against a truly radical dependence on my God.
It has been a powerful thing, this experience.
What I’m saying, I think, is that the “nakedness” I seem to have been called to here, turns out to be something deeper than just the “nakedness” of a person without a car. The true “nakedness” I seem to have been called to is a nakedness that reveals my physical vulnerability — rather like the “nakedness” of a soldier who finds himself unarmed. And it is also, more deeply, a nakedness that reveals my mental vulnerability — in this particular case, the vulnerability of a guy who set himself up for suffering because he assumed in his mind that at age fifty-six he could walk as far in a day, with as heavy a load, as he could thirty years before.
Now, if that is the nature of the “nakedness” I’ve been called to, then my accepting rides, and even driving my own car for an interval in which I am unable to walk, does not necessarily detract from the commitment to “go naked as a sign”. Or so it seems to me. It merely amounts to my confession that what the “nakedness” has revealed, is true: I really am as physically vulnerable, and as much of an idiot, as my hobbling suggests!
— And, too, it leads me to wonder: Do traveling ministers like me need to be visibly broken, in order to let more of God shine through the cracks —?
