April 12, 2001
© 2001 Grant M. Gallup
The Foot-Washing:
by A. R. Ammons
Now you have come,
the roads
humbling your feet with dust.
I will wash your feet
with springwater
and silver care:
The odor of your feet
is newly earthen,
honeysuckled
bloodwork in blue
raisures over the white
skinny anklebone;
if I have wronged you
cleanse me with the falling
water of forgiveness.
And woman, your flat feet
yellow, gray with dust,
your orphaned udders flat,
Lift your dress
up to your knees
and I will wash your feet:
feel the serenity
cool as cool springwater
and hard to find:
if I have failed to know
the grief in your gone time,
forgive me wakened now.
How about using it to buy shoes for shoeless peasants?
Footwashing there is little doubt of.
WE have all heard the argument of the well-shod, that perhaps shoe-shining might replace foot-washing, and I have heard of pastors doing that on Maundy Thursday. Well intentioned I should think, but somewhat like substituting coffee and donuts for the dominical sacrament of the table. Indeed, there is a better argument for that as being indeed of the common life of the people. We all offer each other snacks more frequently than we kneel to shine each other's shoes. Baptism as a sacrament was based on the ancient custom of public bathing, people washing each other in rivers, as one still sees in Two Thirds World countries, or in public baths, as they did in ancient Rome.
The real problem with the Maundy is not its outward sign. The scandal to the church in our time is the inward meaning--that Jesus instituted his church to be a community of humble service. This is what is at the heart of resistance to the Maundy. Well, there's this shyness about bare feet. A gross phallic symbol, to Dr. Freud. The poet Gerard Manley Hopkins linked our wearing shoes to our having forgotten our connections to God's rule, to nature.
"Why do men then now not reck his rod? Generations have trod, have trod, have trod, and all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil; and wears man's smudge and shares man's smell; the soil is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod."
In Managua, one daily sees barefoot people--not only chilren, but adults of all ages; and if not barefoot, then in the simplest "chinelas," little rubber thongs like Chinese peasants. It was very hard to go barefoot in Chicago, on the west side--only children dared, and poor kids hot-footed over the sidewalks as soon as they could, to get to the closest grassy sward. Children are generally closer to their mothers, including mother nature, than we grownups are to ours, and to Mother God. It's hard to believe my memory now, that I spent shoeless summers in upper Michigan wearing nothing but a pair of blue denim overalls, like a picture of Huckleberry Finn. Campesinos, country people, are closer to Mother God, too, than the city dwellers over whom Jesus wept, for the peasant's foot has not wandered far from the land. James Weldon Johnson's prayer in the last stanza of "Lift Ev'ry Voice" asks God to "Keep us forever in the path we pray, lest our feet stray from the places, our God, where we met thee." The slaves of the old South did not often wear shoes.
C. S. Lewis wrote somewhere that every one of us ought never live so far from the earth that we will not be able to go out every day and for half an hour put our foot onto the earth. Not onto concrete, or blacktop, but onto the earth. It is restorative to the spirit, like praying to the East, or sleeping polarized from north to south. Taking off our shoes reminds us that we did not wear them into the world and it is unlikely that we shall wear them in our last bed, the one with the flip top dutch door, where our feet unshod will be out of sight. "Take off thy shoes from off thy feet," God said to Moses. "This is a holy place."
"How breautiful are the feet of one who brings good news," Isaiah's song echoes to us always. The Revelation tells us that the feet of the heavenly Son of Humankind are like burnished bronze. These are not his baby-shoes gilt for the mantle of the fireplace, but of his naked feet, that the apocalyptic vision speaks. I could go on. . . there are hundreds of references in any concordance to "feet", and only a few for "shoes."
The Johannine church connected foot washing to Baptism, as a renewal of that Sacrament. "The one who has bathed does not need to wash, except for the feet, to be clean all over. and you are clean, but not every one of you." For he knew who was to betray him. Betrayal is different from human failure, treachery is different from the dust of the road, and so Jesus said to the disciples, that is to you and me, that we will need the ministry wherein we heal each other's wounded hands and feet, and wash away our human failures and the dust of the pilgrim road, to forgive one another as he has forgiven us.
As the church developed, at least in the west, it took a turn towards secret confession to a presbyter, now become sacerdote, and forgot for centuries that forgiveness is a mutual matter, of sinners to each other. Confidentiality for scandalous sins, for real betrayals and shocking abandonments, made the sealing up of forgiveness necessary, the confidentiality of the confessor and the penitent. But Jesus asked us to bear one another's burdens, forgive each other's sin, wash each other's feet.
During the Contra war against Nicaragua which U.S. taxpayers funded in obedience to their Baal Reagan and their own hysteria, the mercenary army of contras planted a lot of land mines in Nicaraguan forests, on hills and around bridges, which are still being looked for and disinterred. A Quaker friend from Scotland has just finished his Ph.D. in land mind removal techniques, to assist in this enormous task. But during the war, the antipersonnel mines ruined the futures of many Nicaraguans--they were called "quitadedos"-- "toe-takers." Magazines carried a photo of a Nicaraguan father and his 14 year old daughter, in her lovely white dress and white anklets, and open-toed sandals. Her father stood next to her on crutches, and with only one leg. On the other foot was a dusty peasant's shoe. The caption said, "What Contragate dollars do." Jenny Atlee's new book, "Red Thread" (Epica, publisher) has shocking photos of children maimed by Contra mines. And shocking tales of U.S. mayhem in that tropical Garden of Eden.
We need to take off our shoes from off our feet, to see that human feet are holy. The Resurrected Jesus shows his disciples his hands and his feet--they are the wounded hands and feet of the Third World's peasants. They are the naked feet of the gospel in our time, the feet of those who publish peace, who bring glad tidings.
Be swift my soul to answer, O be jubilant my feet! God's truth is marching on.
GRANT GALLUP
CASA AVE MARIA
MANAGUA, NICARAGUA C.A.
gallup@tmx.com.ni
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