vitalwholeness

I don’t come from a foot-washing religious tradition. It’s not that I don’t appreciate the ritual of foot-washing on Maundy Thursday, I do. And in my time I’ve participated in my share. It’s just not something native to my experience, however aware I am of the narrative of the upper room and last supper of Jesus with his disciples.

It is jarring imagery: the rabbi washes the feet of his disciples. In first century Middle-Eastern culture the washing of the feet of guests, providing for their refreshment after dusty journeys, was not unusual. It was generally done by house servants or slaves. And that’s the twist. Jesus takes on the role of servant to make a point, namely, that true leaders are servants. He demonstrated it by taking up a towel, bending over, and washing.

I would have been as shocked as those first ones when it happened. In fact, Peter was so taken aback that he refused to receive the profound gesture of humility. For the story, of course, this was all part of the suffering servant theme, one that would extend far beyond foot washing; the feet of Jesus would not be washed, but rather scarred by Roman nails.

In my world foot washing is not a thing, not really, and certainly not for dinner guests, house guests, and visitors. They are welcome to wash their hands or shower up like everyone else. I have discovered that there are other ways to demonstrate servanthood and express humility.

With my daughter’s diagnosis of colon cancer, we travelled with her through the valley of diagnostic testing, chemotherapy, radiation, and finally surgery. It was major surgery, and the end result was the removal of a tumor. The prognosis is good. But the hospitalization and then recovery in our home has been difficult. It has been difficult in particular because phase one of the surgery necessitated an ileostomy. That will remain until the second surgery some months off when the surgery will put her back together with a bowel resection, a reversal. After that, we hope for total remission.

In the meantime, she is living with what over 100,000 American a year experience – the necessity of using, maintaining, mastering, and living with an ostomy appliance. It is not easy. Skills are required and acquired. The correct supplies are critical. And in addition to travail for the patient, much is required of caregivers.

As one who has been in and around illness and hospitals all my adult life, I was not shocked, either by the surgery or its aftermath. But I have never served in the role of support for a patient with an ostomy, and never served in that role for a member of my own family. It has been challenging. The learning curve alone is steep. Many aspects of life are put on hold. But with the right kind of support, like gifted and devoted ostomy nurses, it becomes possible.

In the early weeks, nothing takes place according to schedule, no matter how well you prepare. Accidents occur and emergency response is needed at any hour, like, for example, 1am in the morning. Addressing the problems when they happen are very important, so that the area surrounding the stoma may heal properly.

It was there one time, in the depths of the night, removing a failed appliance, cleansing the area, attempting another application, changing clothing and washing what needs to be washed, sitting afterwards to make sure all is well, that I came to understand what foot washing means for me in this very particular season of life. It means tending to those who are helpless for whatever reason, humbling ourselves to do so, without resentment or a sense of being bothered. It is honoring, washing and tending the body of the beloved for no other reason than it is needful and you are one who needs to do it.

I was surprised that after a while the ritual of giving and receiving became strangely normal, even giving way to levity, simple songs, puns, and stories from other times. There is a very helpful adhesive ring that seats the devise against the skin immediately around the stoma, and for us that became “The Lord of the Rings.” We who work to put it in place have became “The Fellowship of the Ring.” And so forth.

Mostly, I became aware of the love that is exchanged in those moments. There is a surrendering to the time and place, experiencing the holiness at the intersection of human weakness and help. I was surprised by how much changing an ostomy appliance feels like prayer, and perhaps at its heart it is exactly that, a form of prayer in the midst of ritual and loving.

I suppose each one of us finds different forms of foot washing along the way. When Peter refused to accept the gift of washing, Jesus reminded him that he could have no part in the realm of god without receiving such grace. That is true for us. We need to receive the grace that presents itself before us. With dawning acceptance, Peter retorted that, yes, he would surrender to the foot washing after all, and by the way, Jesus could wash anything else he cared to, like his head and hands as well. For us, it is the anything else that we find along the way, especially in those moments, whether giving or receiving, when we become mindful of the bending, washing, loving and submitting. It is then that we are transported to the upper rooms where loved ones wash one another in preparation for the feast of life.

In the Christian calendar, the days between Palm Sunday and Easter hold a sacred story, the journey of Jesus into the city that kills the prophets, a city that eventually kills him. The entrance on Palm Sunday was much less the portrayal we have customarily received through cinema or Sunday school art, namely, a rock concert entrance with Jesus on stage, fawned over by the swooning crowds, and more like street theater in which he and his beleaguered community acted out a story of entrance of a new sort of reign of God, led, by all things, by a man riding a donkey. Coinciding with the Jesus people demonstration coming in from the east, was a Roman military parade approaching from the west. The contrast couldn’t be more dramatic or illuminating. 

The arc of the story includes crossing a threshold into the crucible of inevitable persecution by authorities in temple and government. The temple could not suffer religious rivals. The Romans would quell any hint of insurrection, living as they did on top of a powder keg of social unrest and backstreet insurrectionists. When Jesus turned over tables on the temple mount, acting out a biblical tradition of cleansing, his fate was essentially sealed; from then on he would be a marked man, regardless of what teaching or truth-telling came out of his mouth. After a farewell covenant-making meal with disciples, an anguishing wait in a nearby garden to be arrested, he was taken, tried, and passed between religious and civil authorities until Roman verdict was passed. He was tortured and then crucified, the common practice of the Romans to enforce their power. It was a technique of terror. And when the Gospels say that Jesus was crucified by Golgotha – a strip pit turned town dump – it was outside the walls, in the margins where other outcasts and trouble makers were dispatched. He was not, as is portrayed on Hallmark cards and popular movies, crucified with two others alone on top of the dump. Rather, he was most certainly in a long line of crosses outside the gates, on the road leading in and out of the city, one of many, a man on his left and man on his right. They were crucified low to the ground, for maximum effect, and vulnerable to dogs. 

He received a burial in a borrowed tomb. In the Christian story the tomb served as a sort of portal, a transitional space for three days, out of which the spirit which can never be killed endured, arose, transformed. The passage through liminal space was not nothing; it was something, and that something had to do with the cost of faithfulness and love, the self-sacrifice undertaken by the best within us, and what lasts on the other side of the empty space of loss. Much must die on the way to rebirth. And the world is made new in much the same way. 

Like many others, I have been to Jerusalem and visited all the traditional sites such as the Via Dolorosa and the garden tomb. When I visited the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the shrine where Jesus was supposedly crucified, presided over by several different religious orders, I came away with a very particular sense of what it was and why it was there, a sense that clarified, in a negative shadow, why I don’t view or understand the death of Jesus in that way. What it has evolved into is a cult of the dead that is understood to have sacral power by virtue of the spilling of blood, and by extension, sacrifice of a savior that appeased a deity that the death somehow sated. Short of that, one could say that the human fascination with death is a shroud that covers the entire story. 

Certainly, death is a particular and shattering aspect of the entire story. But it is not the death that is the final meaning. Death is the end of passage in order that something else is born. It is the passage, the transition, the movement through the valley of the shadow of death, that brings transformational power. To linger forever at the shrine of death is to minimize the impact and power of the great journey and the sacrifices necessary to do so.

It is as though we spent all of our time building altars at Ford’s Theatre to remember the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, but never read the Gettysburg Address, or told the story of what was required to overturn slavery, or explained the impact of the 13th Amendment. It is as though we never moved beyond the balcony of the Lorraine Motel to reflect on the meaning of Martin Luther King’s legacy, never recited stories of the Pettis bridge, his opposition to systemic racism, and the hard-won legislation that overturned the segregation that kept America in chains. 

In the same way that Jesus sojourned in the wilderness before his public ministry, contending with his demons, overcoming temptations to power and enshrining the self, so he sojourned at the end of his seemingly short, meteoric life, in the place where he felt compelled to go, a place where he had no choice but to slay dragons with his words, expose the hypocrisy of empty religious practice and the powers of this world that would eventually fall like rows of corn in harvest. He sojourned in a place and time that required risk, courage, and his life. Like others in history who gave their all in a martyr’s death, he submitted. He also demonstrated in his own flesh the transcendent vision he carried in life, becoming, for a time, the intensity of the reign of God within, until others saw it, too.

The power is in the passage and what comes of that passage. And so we do not linger long in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. We pass through, exit, and go out into the world where truths worth dying for take root and give birth to new realities, a new humanity, a transcendent view, a view that takes one’s breath away. 

Sometimes a poem is crafted in such a way that it speaks to all times as well as particular times. Such is the case with Tablets VI written by the Iraqi-American poet Dunya Mikhail. This is universal verse accomplishes much at the same time, such as telling the story of violence in Ukraine as well as stating reoccurring themes familiar to us in the Christian season of Lent. These excerpts point to all these and more.

When the sun is absent

the flower misses her

and when the absence grows long

the flower looks inside herself

for another light.

I am the plural

who walks to you

as a singular one.

Before you shoot someone

remember their mother’s eyes

will follow you wherever you go

until she drowns you in her tears.

They didn’t like his idea

so they shot him in the head.

From the hole the bullet caused

his idea will reach the world

and unfurl like a climbing plant.

Only one heart resides

in each person

but each is a train full of people

who die

when you kill

what you think is one.

The trees, like us,

resort to their roots

in times of danger.

During the pandemic

we are a forest – trees

standing alone together.

What if the guns

turn into pencils

in the hands of the soldiers

and they underline

the places on the map

as sites they must see

before they die?