c. 1999 Religion News Service

(Eugene Kennedy, a longtime observer of the Roman Catholic Church, is professor emeritus of psychology at Loyola University in Chicago and author most recently of”My Brother Joseph, published by St. Martin Press.)

(UNDATED) As a matter of fact, and despite this old Catholic puritan riff about the danger of unseemly self-revelation incurred by girls daring enough to wear them, black patent leather shoes not only shine up, they also speak to you.

They speak in the extraordinary language of mute things. For silent objects actually constitute a human art gallery through which we pass every day, often not noticing or not heeding these voices that whisper to us of themes deeper than those of the routine e-mail or cellular phone traffic that drown them out.

Black patent leather shoes speak in a way that nothing else does when they are worn by people in wheel chairs. Their surfaces never lose their reflective gleam, their soles are as smooth as a harvest field because they show no signs of wear. Such scuff-free shoes reveal the burden of infirmity to us with heart shattering directness.

These sacraments of loss are symbols of the human state and its deepest truths that signal to us, as eloquently as bread and wine, of the deaths _ half deaths worse than whole ones _ the handicapped endure as, unable to rise again physically, they resurrect themselves spiritually before our eyes.

They proclaim loss powerfully and raise the curtain on dramas, perhaps beyond our own bearing, of lives suddenly and literally stopped in their tracks by accident, illness or sacrifice in war, by the unexpected that can form as swiftly as a funnel cloud and sweep through a well-ordered life as hurricanes do through trailer parks.

These shoes tell us of a before and an after in the lives of those who wear them, of a time when their plans were like everybody else’s and they were, like people in pre-war pictures, smiling and innocent of the ordeal that lay just ahead of them to change them and their plans.

They provoke meditation about life and chance and whether and how we would cope with such a challenge. Could we accept what is forced on those whose shoes cry out because they can never wear out? How foolish and empty the baubles of the New Age movement, the silent crystals, for example, that, in the face of tragedy, reveal that they have nothing to say.

Sometimes it is a person with whom we never talk who nonetheless speaks to us of life and its mysteries. I saw former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara sitting alone in a restaurant atop a San Francisco hotel recently. He sipped an iced tea, unto himself if ever a man was, and what thoughts were his one could only wonder. He did not look out the window as the early evening fog crept across the bay. He climbed, bent, absorbed, a widower going through the motions, up the steps to the buffet, picked up a plate, glanced at the array indecisively.

A tour group from Australia suddenly entered, heading directly toward the displays of food, enveloping him in their noisy midst, defeating him, too, in some other way, for he put down his plate and hurried, as if the sounds of a good time were, on that day at least, too much for him, and slipped quickly out of the restaurant. The unfurled napkin he left by his barely sipped glass of iced tea seemed like a flag left on a field of battle.

Driving on Wells Street in Chicago’s Loop the other day, the sun, whose surface roars beyond our hearing, played powerfully down through the Elevated train tracks, imposing, as if from a blueprint, an extraordinary pattern on the roadway, the bustling people and the passing cars.

This was not the work of the noonday devil but of the sun, always the symbol of the Eternal, pouring down like a Niagara through the rails and rude ties that filtered the light, as time does eternity, offering us a small and silent revelation about our time stifled longing for something beyond the confines of the calendar and the clock.

All this, silently, at lunch time in Chicago, a mantle of spiritual mystery falling on us all. Such utterly quiet revelations abound everywhere, every day whether we are watching or not.

DEA END KENNEDY