The Shoes: 30 Years, 30 Days, 30 Stories. Day 23 out of 30

The Shoes.

Matt in the Village of Arcatao, just on the way to Los Posos

Somewhere on the road from San Salvador past Chilatenango, San Jose Flores, and the Rio Sumpul, right up against the edge of the border of Honduras, just off the road to Arcatao, is the village of Los Posos. There in El Salvador, in a place that you can’t find on google maps, is a small village. In the village in the midst of the conjunction of three small streams is a rock. This seems to be an ordinary rock, but it is revered by the people of the village because it was there that Padre Pinderas, a missionary from the village, preached. Every year on the anniversary of his death the 50 or so people in the village celebrate. There is a play the night before re-enacting his life and a mass using the rock as an altar. They tie brightly colored tissue papers in the lush green trees surrounding the village, there is music and dancing, tamales filled with a little chicken to eat, and at the moment of the consecration of the Eucharist they light off fireworks to alert everyone around. There amidst the simple adobe houses, a people who have so little celebrate so much.

Carlos, another Jesuit, driving down to his home village
of Los Posos. 

            In the summer of 2005 I went to live in El Salvador to learn Spanish, and to begin to maybe do some research for my graduate thesis. It was early one Wednesday morning when the Rector of the house where I was living told me at breakfast that I would be going out to the campo for the weekend. I was told not to take extra clothes, just a small book bag maybe with an extra t-shirt and underwear, and be ready to leave on Friday afternoon. I talked with one of the other Jesuits, Carlos, who invited me along to his family’s house for the feast and so I went. When we arrived I discovered that I would be staying in the town’s small health clinic, really it was a first aid shack, and I found that people were bringing things there to wrap as prizes for the fiesta. 
        One young woman, not much older than me, had taken the rickety, old, beat up school bus to the market down what could barely be called a road to Chilatenango. There she bought the nicest pair of shoes that she could afford and carried them back with her. As the man organizing the shoes wrapped them up for the feast he said: “Shoes for the migrants…” and handed them to a small boy who put them with the rest of the door prizes to be taken down to the chapel.

            That night, after the play, names were drawn, and sure enough her fiancée won the shoes. These were the shoes meant for the migrants. A look of fear and sadness swelled on her face, as her eyes puffed and spilled tears even as her strength and will held them back. The shoes for the migrants… was the man she loved now going to become one? This one gift brought so much freedom and joy to him, but at the same time anxiety and uncertainly for all around. Would they lose him? These shoes were too nice to work in the fields around Los Posos. They would not serve to pick pineapple, they would not work to tending to animals, and they would only crush beans. Would he use the shoes for what they were intended for?

Me, somewhere in El Salvador. 

            The shoes for the migrants are a gift that so many of us get in our lives, things that are so wonderful and attractive and freeing, but at the same time confusing, and even terrifying. A world full of possibility can just as easily be a world full of doubt. All doors being open means that one could just as easily choose the wrong path. During that time in my vocation, I was beginning to come into my own as a Jesuit. I began to really feel like I could be a good Jesuit, and that was terrifying. My vocation was like those shoes, it offered me more freedom than I had ever imagined, and unto itself it gave me the challenge to do something with it. In Deuteronomy the people of Israel, freed from slavery in Egypt, felt the same thing and God was clear with them: “Here, then, I have today set before you life and prosperity, death and doom…I call heaven and earth today to witness against you: I have set before you life and death, the blessing and the curse. Choose life, then, that you and your descendants may live.”

            The question becomes one of what we do with the awful possibility of our own freedom. How do we live with new-found freedom and in the darkness of the future? The truth is that we don’t. No one lives in the future, and Deuteronomy tells us how to get through, simply by holding fast to the Lord in the present. In the times since that date, when I have held fast to God and lived in the present, when I have been able to trust in God the freedom of that moment has given me hope. When I have been fearful is when my freedom didn’t represent a choice for God, but for my own willfulness and cunning (of which I have little that is useful) to get me through. Our shoes can take us many places, the question is who directs our steps. We have no need for directions if we can let the one who loves us direct us.