“Do not come near; take your sandals off your feet, for the place on which you are standing is holy ground.”
Exodus 3:5
Dear members and friends,
Holy ground is not necessarily a different piece of physical place on earth. It becomes holy because our mind recognizes and acknowledges the Divine Presence being present. This raises a question for us.
Where is our holy ground?
Perhaps we imagine that holy ground must be somewhere distant: sacred sanctuary, a pilgrimage site, a mountain, or a place where something extraordinary happened. But the story of Moses illustrates otherwise. Moses encountered God while he was doing his ordinary work. The sacred appeared in the midst of the everyday. Perhaps a burning bush is present within our lives, yet we have not noticed.
A key lesson in finding our own burning bush may be revealed to our mind, “Do not come near; take your sandals off your feet.” There are things we carry with us, especially in our minds, that block us from recognizing holy ground. We carry assumptions, judgments, fears, resentments, habits, and a tendency to reduce reality to what is immediately visible and appreciable. We can become so accustomed to the outward world that we forget to ask what lies within it. To take off our shoes, spiritually speaking, is to become willing to set some of these things aside.
Swedenborg strongly emphasizes this matter because the sensory level is the outermost level of our earthly existence. It is deeply immersed in the physical world, in the body, and in the things immediately before us. Consequently, it is also the part of us least prepared to receive heavenly light. The journey toward God therefore involves not rejecting the senses but putting them in their proper place. We do not destroy our ordinary way of seeing. We learn to see beyond it.
Moses takes off his shoes, and then he hears God. Only after this encounter does God reveal what Moses is being called to do: “I have surely seen the oppression of my people… Come, I will send you to Pharaoh.” The encounter with holiness is therefore not an escape from the world. It prepares Moses to return to the world with a new vision and a greater purpose. This may be one of the deepest lessons of the burning bush: We take off our shoes not to leave the world, but to learn how to see the world differently.
The ground was already beneath Moses’ feet. The bush was already there. The mountain was already there. But when Moses encountered the Divine, he discovered that the ordinary ground beneath him was holy. Perhaps the same is true for us. There may be holy ground beneath our feet today. The question is whether we are willing to stop, turn aside, recognize the burning bush, and take off our shoes. “The place on which you are standing is holy ground.” May we learn to recognize it.
Blessings,
Rev. Junchol Lee