"Our first task in approaching another people, another culture, another religion, is to take off our shoes, for the place we are approaching is holy. Else we find ourselves treading on another's dreams. More serious still, we may forget that God was there before our arrival." John Taylor

We've been taking off our shoes a lot in India. On Monday we hopped barefoot across the hot, sun-baked floor of a Hindu temple devoted to Shiva. On Tuesday we wiggled our toes in the dust of an Ashram built by devotees of the guru Ramana. Last week in Chennai we left our shoes on the ground floor above the tomb of St. Thomas. We removed our shoes at a mosque in Delhi, and again at a church in Tiruvunnamalai. This morning we padded unshod through parts of the visitor center for Auraville, a community perhaps best described as deeply humanist.

The tradition of removing shoes is an ancient one--the Old Testament, after all, tells that God commanded Moses to remove his sandals before the burning bush--and one that transcends cultures. And almost everywhere, it seems to be tied to a deep understanding that to remove shoes is to show respect. It is to leave behind the dust of the world and enter with nothing but skin to shield the encounter. It is to make ourselves vulnerable to being shaped by the elemental aspects of human relationships, to acknowledge that we can't help being changed by them.

My favorite experience without shoes came last Sunday night. During our time in Tiruvunnamalai we were hosted by the Quo Vadis Center for Interfaith Dialogue. On Sunday night, our group was temporarily reunited with the other group traveling in India through LPGM, and we had the opportunity to participate together in a weekly meditation service offered as part of Quo Vadis' programming.

So off came the shoes as we gathered under an open-air roof, and sat in a circle around a bright oil lamp and a prayer canvas that had been painted by previous visitors. Some of the Indian guests who regularly visit the center sang songs in Tamil. There was a time for sharing our names and our feelings in that moment, and then the director of Quo Vadis provided a short message before leading us into meditation. "Fear not," he reminded us. "Fear is what holds us back as human beings." He spoke of the many passages in the Bible that begin with these words and of the necessity of surrendering fear for the sake of dialogue.

At first I was afraid to take off my shoes in India. I've read about parasites that enter the body through the soles of the feet and have been vexed by the many sharp things that could cut through un-toughened skin. Most Indians go barefoot most of the time, and like many things in the developing world, it's easy to approach the issue of shoe-less-ness as a problem to be pitied or a danger to be avoided. So too with other faith traditions. It's a frequent human tendency to fear what we don't know. If we deny ourselves direct contact, our own insulation from what we think is unclean or, more tragically, that which has burned us in the past, keeps us from the enrichment that comes from engaging the other. And yet, it is in these encounters across faith traditions, in taking off our shoes, that we learn about an entirely different way of being human, and of understanding God.

Because taking off our shoes leaves us altered. We'll develop callouses, but also increased sensitivity. We may stub our toes once in a while, but in the long run, we're left with a heightened awareness of those ground-level wonders of the world that before we would have trod right over. We come away, in other words, transformed.

At the heart of India are people, and regardless of religion or anything else that might divide them from us--and from each other--shared humanity surpasses difference. Perhaps that has been the most important lesson of India. Like shoes, expectations must be left at the door. The people, the places, the circumstances we've met along the way haven't always fit into our pre-India understanding of what "India" actually means, but the ground beneath our feet is home to a country far richer than our imagination of it. God was here long before us, and God calls us to embrace what we've found here: the heartbreaking and the breathtaking, the splendid and the vulgar. At the confluence of all these things, we have found that perhaps our common ground is, in fact, holy as well.

-Mary Beenken