Shoes Off in Her Own Kitchen

The linoleum in Opal's kitchen went down in 1994 and it has been on the list to be replaced since about 2007.

It has held up better than anybody expected everywhere except two places. In front of the stove and in front of the sink, it has gone through entirely, down to the boards, in two patches roughly the shape and size of a person standing.

Her granddaughter is nine and staying for a week because of a situation nobody is discussing in front of her.

The child takes her shoes off at the door. She does that because they do that at her other grandmother's house, and she is a rule follower, and it does not occur to her that the rules might be different in different houses.

Wednesday morning she is standing in her socks in front of the stove waiting on oatmeal and she looks down and says, why is this bit a different color.

Opal says, without looking up, because that is where I stand.

And then hears herself.

Thirty-one years of standing in that one place. Every morning of a marriage and the end of a marriage. The week her son was in the hospital and she cooked for eleven people who came and went and does not remember one thing about it except the sound of the pot. Every Christmas. Every ordinary Tuesday, which is most of a life. Thirty-one years of one woman standing in one square of floor has worn the shape of her feet into a house.

And she has never in her life thought of that patch of floor as anything at all.

If you had asked Opal where holy ground was, at any point in the last sixty-seven years, she would have given you an answer with distance in it. A mountain somewhere. A cathedral she saw a photograph of once. The place where something happened in the Bible. Somewhere you would have to travel to and where you would probably feel something on arrival, and which she has never expected to see and has made her peace with never seeing.

The oatmeal is doing that thing where it starts to catch, and she moves it off, standing where she always stands.

You have a patch like that. Yours might be in a hallway, or a stairwell, or a bay in a warehouse, or a seat in a car. But you know where you stand, and you have never once thought the word could be about that spot.

He was at work when it happened

Moses is eighty years old and he is not on a pilgrimage. He is doing his job, which is minding somebody else's sheep, in a place the text calls the backside of the desert, which is not a compliment.

And he said, Draw not nigh hither: put off thy shoes from off thy feet, for the place whereon thou standest is holy ground.Exodus 3:5

The place whereon thou standest.

Not, come over here to the holy place. Not, the mountain three miles east is holy, present yourself there properly. The ground under the feet he already had on it, in a working day, in a job he had been doing for forty years and would have expected to die doing.

You are standing on the ground that verse is talking about, right now, as you read. That is the written word and not a kindness I invented at a stove, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes a sentence spoken out of a bush and lays it on two worn patches of a kitchen floor.

And think about what had changed about that ground. Nothing. Geologically, nothing whatsoever. It was the same sand on Monday. Moses had probably walked over that exact spot a hundred times with the flock and never taken his sandals off, and it was not holy then, and it did not become holy because the dirt improved.

It became holy because God turned up on it.

That is the entire mechanism, and it is the only mechanism. Not the quality of the site. Not its history. Not whether anything important ever happened there before. The presence, and nothing else.

Which means the question was never about the ground

So the question you have been asking your whole life is the wrong question, and asking it more sincerely was never going to help.

You have been asking: is this ground special enough? And the answer to that is no, obviously, it is linoleum from 1994 and it needs replacing, and it has always been no and it always will be.

The question in Exodus 3 is: is He here?

This is yours, and the ground under your feet has already been made holy by the same mechanism, and it is already settled. Exodus 3 says the place whereon thou standest, and the same Spirit who did not leave when the bush stopped burning is the one making it a present fact in a woman moving a pot off a hot ring.

Now let me be careful the way I would be on my own porch, because there is a wrong turn near here.

I am not telling you that everywhere is the same and nothing is set apart. That would empty the word out entirely, and the whole passage is against it: Moses is told to take his shoes off, which is a real instruction about real reverence and he does it. Set apart ground is set apart, and there is a proper trembling in that verse.

I am telling you it was a sheep pasture. It was a working man's Tuesday. He did not travel to it. The set-apartness came out to where he already was, and if that is how it worked for Moses then a kitchen is not too small a place for it and neither is anywhere else you have to stand tomorrow.

And nobody taught you to put the word far away on purpose. It is a very old drift and it happens everywhere, and there is nobody in your family to blame for it. There is a floor, and a nine-year-old in her socks, and a question you have never been asked before.