Friday, October 11, 2019

Holy kicks

I need new walking shoes, and Keen no longer makes the ones that have taken me more than a thousand miles (yes, they should have been replaced at half that, but....). Searching the interwebs for something suitable, these shoes came up. INRI shoes, Nikes with 60 ml of water from the Jordan (holy water, blessed by a priest). Complete with red wool insoles (to remind you of the previous Pope's Pradas and sorry, I couldn't resist the alliteration), a "papal" seal and a crucifix. Cost? $1425 because the verse in which Jesus walks on the water is Matthew 14:25. (I think they missed a connection when they made 24 pairs, not 12.) They sold out in 1 minute, but you can get them on the resale market.

You could argue the shoes are reliquaries, holding water from the Jordan in which Jesus was baptized, though the actual water poured over his head is long flowed to the sea. Still, over two millennia and assuming good mixing, the probability is high that some of those molecules (perhaps a hundred) are once again in the Jordan and now in the INRI shoes that once poured over Jesus' head. By the same arguments, there might be a thousand molecules of water in my tea that once poured over Jesus's head.  Does this make the shoes a first class relic? My tea?

It's all holy ground we walk on, $1425 holy kicks or not. And I still need to find new walking shoes.

2 comments:

  1. Wow! Who thinks these things up??

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Lord knows! And I’m still hunting for new walking shoes!

      Delete