Ordinary Shoes

"Beauty (is) a grace wholly gratuitous.” -- Annie Dillard

Yesterday, my youngest son and I were walking around a local shoe shop. Wandering around display tables, he noticed two familiar shoes -- one worn by his brother and another worn by his pastor. These were ordinary shoes that do not demand one's attention, and, yet, my son noticed. It was a small, seemingly insignificant moment that highlighted something urgent.

I said to him, "I love that you notice things like that. That's what an artist does."

"What do you mean, dad?"

"Well....an artist pays attention. He slows down to see things more clearly and then tells others what he sees."

I want to pay attention.

I am too often prone to hurried postures -- to a kind of utility without grace. I bear the unnecessary burden of pretend urgencies, deferring to a cynical kind of productivity that accepts the fate of perpetual restlessness -- perhaps the better word here is 'weariness'. If I slow down, I will have to work harder to prove that I am good enough, that my work-based value is still intact, that beauty (the things I pay attention to) will not be a distraction from the more important things.

Perhaps these kinds of distractions are the very things I need to challenge my tired illusions of self-sufficiency. When I slow down and pay attention, I recover a reality that is comfortable with the language of hope and flourishing. In this space, I relearn the rhythms of work and rest. I handle beauty with care because it is not a luxury but a necessity.

Here, I think about myself less.

Beauty, then, is a different kind of distraction -- one that slowly shapes our souls to be more receptive to the quiet transcendence raging in and around us. Yes, there will always be things we have to finish (utility is not inherently bad!), but I have never met a person who says, "You know what? I am really good at resting." We are slow to feed our souls. To rest. We forget that beauty is oxygen (see Wes Vander Lugt's Beauty Is Oxygen), something we need to survive:

It is difficult to get the news from poems

yet men die miserably every day

for lack

of what is found there.

(William Carlos Williams, “Asphodel, That Greeny Flower”)

Andy Crouch writes that "the economy of grace overflows with the unuseful." We are quick to assign value to something based on how it works or if it works, but grace confronts our preference for mere pragmatism and expands our periphery to see a world rich with joy, mystery, and longing. Grace is the slow feast to which we are invited, the unhurried lavishness of food and drink, the full attentiveness of the host who beholds the table he has set and laughs with booming delight. As Charles, the main character in Morgan Talty's wonderful novel Fire Exit says: "What’s more sacred than laughter at the dinner table?"

What's more sacred than lives sharing the abundance of grace, the kind of beauty that makes us more human?

Beauty is always happening around you.

Pay attention.

And when you put on your shoes today, remind yourself to walk a little more slowly.