Washing Feet

The following is a blessing I wrote for the WillBridge Interfaith Footwashing for the Homeless on April 1, Maundy Thursday, just a few days before Easter. It was a great experience, one of the holiest parts of Holy Week.

Great Spirit,
We touch the world primarily through our feet.

It is on these delicate, unassuming, and yet deceptively resilient pins of skin and cartilage and bone that we propel ourselves through life – one step at a time.
It is on these feet that we take our first steps, dance our first dance, leave home, or maybe lose our home and, if we are lucky, find home once more.

As we get older we rarely go barefoot. We quickly learn that the world is not covered with soft green grass that tickles our feet. We discover, most of us, that many of the roads we must tread are hard-paved, rough-paved, sharp-paved – and yet walk them we must.

Our shoes wear down first, over and over again and our socks, which wear thin at heel and toe – and it’s worse when they get wet and there’s no place to dry them. Then our feet suffer and complain; dreaming of warmth, dryness, fresh cotton and a vacation no matter how brief, from carrying our weight.

This is why we are here today; this is why we wash the feet of the people we love. This is why we wash the feet of strangers, sometimes, on special days like today. In this simple act we are reminded of our shared humanity, a sister-brotherhood born of our common experience walking the hard and wondrous roads of life, diverse as they may be.

There are few acts more intimate, more loving or more connective than holding the vulnerable and road-weary feet of another human being, to hold them, to soak, soap, wash and dry them. To do this is to hold someone’s humanity, their very life, in your two hands.

This is a kind of communion; an act of love, a holy act. This is what the Rabbi Jesus was trying to show his disciples when he washed their feet on that first Maundy Thursday so long ago – that the sacred enters the world through simple acts of love.
And so may your hands be gentle and sensitive to the inherent worth and dignity of everyone they touch, and may they honor the lives they will hold today, calluses and all.

May your feet find rest and safety in the simple comfort of being held. May they relax with a sigh into warm water and fresh clean socks, and through this, remember that they (and you) are loved. May they delight in the unaccustomed sensation of sunshine and cool breeze.

May the source of all that is good be in us, through us and all around us today, and everyday – no matter what roads we must travel tomorrow.

Amen

For more information (or better yet, to get involved) go here:
http://www.willbridgeofsantabarbarainc.org/