Cracked Open: a Reflection on Maundy Thursday
To say that I am enthusiastic about Maundy Thursday foot washing is the understatement of the century. It would be more accurate to call me a rabidly passionate lover of foot washing. In seminary, I wrote a hundred page thesis on Maundy Thursday, the majority of which is devoted to lambasting people who don’t wash feet or don’t do it right. I am, you might say, zealous for the cause.
I have never had a problem with feet, never understood why people squeal with embarrassment, hide their feet in mock horror, or insist on getting a pedicure before taking off their socks in church. For years, I could not fathom why someone wouldn’t want to get their feet washed. I have preached my fair share of stern sermons making it very clear that, when Jesus tells us to wash each other’s feet, it’s a commandment, not a suggestion. Every year, I bared my feet with pride.
And then, this summer, something happened. A callus on the soft pad of my foot attracted my nervous attention. Spurred by boredom, restlessness, or aimless anxiety, I picked at it. I suppose I subconsciously thought that, if I was diligent enough, I could remove the callus by sheer force of will and strength of fingernails. As I excavated deeper and deeper, the callus turned into a crater. Eventually, inevitably, I struck live flesh. Propelled by mad instinct, I didn’t, couldn’t stop. Within no time, what had been a healthy foot with a small callus was a mangled pulp of infected flesh.
I have never been so ashamed in my life. For as long as I could, I pretended everything was fine. I did my best to cover up the gaping hole in my foot, wearing sneakers even though it was August. When I could no longer walk without excruciating pain, I finally admitted I needed help. I swallowed my pride, limped to the doctor, and allowed another human being to take my shame in hand, to examine, clean, and bandage it. As I explained to the polite physician’s assistant what had happened, I was convinced she would recoil in horror, mock me, or have me parceled off immediately to the nearest psych hospital (to her endless credit, she did none of the above). I felt broken, exposed, and completely unhinged – clearly, normal people don’t rip open their own appendages with their fingernails out of boredom.
Even after receiving medical care, the veil of shame still hung heavily. The antibiotics I received would treat the infection, but the wound was still so painful that I was forced to buy a pair of crutches – which, in turn, meant that I was forced to fabricate a false explanation for why I was hobbling around on crutches without a visible cast or splint to show off. I couldn’t possibly tell the truth about what I had done. The crutches, it transpired, were such a spectacle that I retreated even further into shame, taking three days off of work to hide and recover. It took two weeks for me to walk normally and without pain again.
Nearly a year later, I can count the people who know what really happened on one hand. I never quite figured out how I was supposed to mention, in polite company, “oh, by the way, I’m a compulsive skin picker?” Like so many of the private wounds that torture us the most, skin picking is a topic that our society has labeled as taboo. Despite the fact that millions of people suffer from the same compulsive need to shred their own flesh, few doctors will diagnose it, few therapists know about it, and no one really knows how to treat it. Skin picking is an awfully lonely business.
This year, for the first time ever, I don’t want anyone to touch my feet on Maundy Thursday. I don’t want someone running their fingers over the scar on my sole, which still burns with the memory of shame. I don’t want to be asked what happened. I don’t want to be exposed in all my messy, broken, raw vulnerability.
Which means that this is the year I need foot washing most of all. This is the year it might really mean something to me, not in theological abstraction, but in my own body. Because what Jesus wanted, when he knelt before his disciples, towel in hand, was to get right to the heart of their shame, their woundedness, their secret pain. He wanted to take their brokenness in hand and love it, not in some fluffy abstract way, but physically. Skin to skin. Body to body. He yearned to touch his friends’ most vulnerable, fearful places and say, “even this is not too broken, too twisted, too gross for me to love. Not even close.”
That is what Maundy Thursday is all about. A chance for us to experience in our own bodies the sweet reassurance that no secret pocket of shame is too much for God to handle. For most of us, our deepest wounds have nothing to do with our feet, so we have to use our imaginations. Perhaps what we need to offer to God’s embrace is our shame around infertility, depression, chronic disease, addiction, or something else entirely. Perhaps the wound that’s crying out for healing doesn’t fit into the tidy box of a label or a diagnosis. The point is, no matter what we think is “wrong” with us, we are never too broken for God to love. And that the way we heal is not to hide, but to open. Today, this extraordinary, holy Thursday, cracks open normal space and time to create a space of safety, where we can be Christ to one another and experience the grace of being seen, touched, held with infinite love. Let the water dissolve your shame. Let the hands of your neighbor cradle your vulnerability. Let the towel embrace your pain. Tonight, you are seen. Tonight, you are loved. Tonight, you are whole.