WHAT, HAVE WE BEEN MISTAKEN ABOUT SHOES? Or is this a modern parable?

THE NEW YORK TIMES ARTICLE, suggests running shoes may not be good for us. The piece has had a good run, both in the 'most emailed' and 'most viewed' lists for the past month. According to this view, a couple of million or so years of evolving into remarkably efficient walkers and runners has given us the ability to cover very large distances, due to the structure of our legs and feet, and also to our ability to cool by perspiration.

This gave us the ability to hunt game despite their being more fleet. In turn, this altered our diet to include more protein and fat and so may have influenced the development of larger brains. The few remaining hunter-gatherers, mainly in Africa, do not wear shoes.

I do not know when we first began to wear shoes. I am sure there was not much science to it. Shoes have proved their worth, assisting us to explore and populate all sorts of environments and accomplish difficult tasks. However, when I was a little fellow, in the Summer, we did without shoes totally, except when having to wear our best. Remarkable, really, how tough the soles of one's feet can become. Years ago a colleague of mine who trained marathon runners (before marathons were all the rage) told me he always ran in bare feet!

Wearing shoes has possibly altered the way we walk, transforming our gait from stepping onto the balls of our feet to first striking the ground with our heels. Soon after reading the NY Times article I was watching a tourism advertisement on the local South Australian TV. I was astonished to see a father and son of about eight years walking along the beach. The father strode along heels first while his son followed, springing along using the balls of his feet!

I have a pair of those fancy foot gloves, no cushioning of the heel, which encourages me to step first onto the front of the foot. It was a little strange at first but it seems to work just fine.

As part of buying a new bike, I was offered a free bike fit and pedaling instruction. Me...learn to pedal? Turns out a lot has been discovered about the science of pedaling. And would you believe, I have had to learn a new way to do that too! Recall that adage about old dogs and new tricks?

About the same time, I have been reading about the Jewish origins of the Christian faith. A bit odd, you might suppose, for an expressed agnostic, but I am holding onto the possibility that one might be influenced by Jesus even if one were to be atheistic. Back then, following the teaching of Jesus was know as 'walking in the way'.

Is there a metaphor, even a parable, tucked away here somewhere I wonder?

From what we can discover from recently unearthed early Christian writings and from a study of the gospels, what those early followers in the way believed and thought about Jesus could be very different from more recent, traditional views. I am not sure that one can assert that the early views, if different, are more correct than those modern Christian beliefs. Jewish sandals or Christian clogs...who can say?

Even so, I find it very liberating to try to discover what kind of person Jesus might have been and to get away from complex ideas, developed centuries after the fact, of who he was and what was his game, as a contrary Jew in a Jewish culture, with Jewish history behind him.

If the early believers in Jesus could have heard these doctrines, they would likely be greatly surprised, as well might have Jesus. Early beliefs about Jesus sat easily side by side with conventional Jewish views and could have been seen as an advance on current understanding of Jewish scriptures, as any reading of the Book of Acts, the earliest history of the spread of belief in Jesus, can demonstrate.

As I have mentioned in earlier postings, from the third century onward, the Church has fostered views of the nature of the world that are dualistic (heaven separated from earth, and so on) and unsupportable in the light of scientific knowledge, although consonant with the understanding of the third century.

As the saying has it, 'If the shoe fits, wear it.' But which shoe? The sandals of those early believers or the clogs of classical western Christianity? Perhaps neither. We need new shoes to try on.

One thing we do know. Whenever those early Christians met, it was with a profoundly powerful sense that Jesus was somehow amongst them. In these meetings we know they always broke bread and drank wine with a deliberate focus on the selfless life of Jesus who brought to them the strong sense of divine love.

Though important particularly for Christians, Jesus need not be the only spiritual guide since there are many who have though deeply about what it means to live a godly, or good life. Perhaps there are modern prophets to whom we might listen. What it seems to me I can do is to keep my life open to the possible in-rushing of spiritual insight and energy, an opening up of 'the way'.

Like new shoes that help me to a new way of walking.