My husband and I slipped in two minutes before the Maundy Thursday service began.
We had both worked all day. I was wearing too-tight boots that rubbed little hotspots of pain into my toes and my heels and a pair of sweaty socks. He was wearing sweaty gym socks under his dress shoes since his workout had run late.
We had forgotten, clearly, about the footwashing.
Previous churches we attended did not acknowledge Maundy Thursday for the most part; one Methodist church did, but only with a brief “experiential reflective” service and a few short readings. Other churches I attended in the past offered foot-washing services, but not within the context of the liturgy: they were accompanied by swelling contemporary Christian choruses and bright videos.
So when I sat down and opened the order of service I froze, and pointed to the line: “Washing of feet”
“No,” I hissed to my husband under my breath, “no no no no no.”
I would have washed my feet before the washing. I would have removed my socks with little printed mushrooms on them. I would have worn shoes that did not render my feet stinky, swollen, and uncomfortable. I wondered if we should leave. My husband, clearly mortified, was wondering the same thing.
In the end, we didn’t have to worry. Our church, as is its wont, approached the service in a gentle manner: footwashing was on offer to those who opted to partake, but so was remembering your baptism.
I joined the line for the font, and dipped my fingers in the water, and made the sign of the cross on my forehead. I came back to my seat and watched the bold and brave get their feet washed.
I thought: it’s a hard thing to be vulnerable with people, isn’t it? I don’t want them to judge me or my stinky feet (though our pastor and our intern would never). I don’t want to feel uncomfortable. I want to be known and recognized and loved, just maybe not in this intimate of a way right this second. I wanted to be prepared and “clean” before I presented myself to experience an act of loving service.
It is hard to be vulnerable with God, too. We think we are. I suspect it’s easiest for us in our anger and our suffering. But we are often not good at sharing the real fears, the real frustrations, the real stinky-ugly-worn-out parts of our hurting, uncomfortable selves.
Washing feet demands humility. Having your feet washed demands vulnerability. Both are necessary. Both teach us the way of Christ.
Here’s my Easter gift early this year, embodied in Maundy Thursday: I so love, love, love, the liturgy.
I love receiving communion every week. I like walking up in a line of shuffling shambling human people and with them and all who have gone before us remembering the Lord. I love that it happens every Sunday no matter how I feel or what I’ve been doing.
I love the cool feeling of the water-cross on my forehead reminding me of who I am.
I love watching our congregants serve each other.
I love the bittersweet sorrow of sitting, overwhelmed, watching the altar be stripped bare, and the silence that hangs in the air when we leave, even into the parking lot.
I love that we beg forgiveness, together, and own our sin as a community.
Most of all, what I love is that as we play out the triduum we live out our faith in a way that feels real and tangible to me, fraught with tenderness and grief and the promise of giddy joy.
I believe there are many, many ways to worship and to engage Christ. I spent a lot of my time growing up in churches where Good Friday and Holy Week services sought to elicit a deep emotional response in any number of ways. Sometimes we watched gruesome reenactments of the scourging of Christ; we were asked to use nails and hammers to pound our own sins into a cross; we listened to jangling music and went through various reflective practices.
I know, because I witnessed, that those practices did bring some people into the experience of Holy Week in a meaningful way. I don’t want to diminish them. But I always struggled to connect with those; often, in the process, I wound up more alienated than engaged.
For whatever reason, the practices of liturgy—quiet, ancient, and deeply sensory—draw me into the passion in ways that other experiences have not. I came undone tonight watching the stripping of the altar. I still remember the scent of the anointing oil from Ash Wednesday. I feel the wet cross on my forehead. Somehow, the simplicity of these reminders means more than enough. They ask me to enter in.
It has been a long Lent.
Tomorrow will break our hearts.
But Easter is coming.
Samaritan's Song 