Smelly feet and gaping darkness

John 13:36: Simon Peter asked him, “Lord, where are you going?”

Jesus replied, “Where I am going, you cannot follow now, but you will follow later.”

Maundy Thursday has become a yearly checkpoint for my soul. At my friend’s Episcopal church, the service moves from the high church ceremony, to washing strangers’ feet, to my favorite part: the ending, when the altar is stripped, the lights are extinguished, and we are left staring up at a high, deep darkness hanging heavy overhead.

At the core, these moves are performance art. They’re not about sparing someone a shower day when they get home or doing some church laundry—they’re about participating together in an experience that makes tangible some intangible truths.

Indeed, that is the point of the liturgical calendar followed by many “high” churches; to participate in a shared experience together, to center each of our hearts hearts on a bigger story than whatever is occupying the world of the individual.

So despite my nondenominational background, Holy Week has become this place where every year, I seek out experiences to tie my story to these artistic expressions and communal experiences. And the Episcopal Maundy Thursday service works as a kind of model: in my art and in my life, I seek to make the same moves into servanthood and into silence.

First, servanthood is a move of uncomfortable connection. 

Each holy week, I seek decidedly unglamorous ministry. I seek to serve and be served in ways that break me out of my religious routines. In the Episcopal church, I literally peel off my sweaty socks for a stranger to wipe my feet, or I get down on my knees, into the grime of others’ journeys.

It’s humiliating, to uncover our hidden humanness and allow each other to smell and touch it, but it is intimate as well.

This year, unable to go to a Maundy Thursday service, I am painting Christ with his crown of thorns. Blood makes me deeply uncomfortable; I have a really hard time even watching cartoon violence, because it’s empathetic for me in my body. I don’t like to think about how we are made up of fragile, sensitive flesh, so meditating on this aspect of Jesus is challenging for me.

I’m also sharing about my own sensitive flesh, and the violence I’ve endured, which is a hard kind of intimacy for me. I think God’s specifically challenging me to let other people see how my journey has been hard and painful for me, to see the callouses and dirt and scars on my smelly feet that I’d prefer to keep covered.

In obeying, I find connection this week. I connect with good, true friends, and with Jesus in a deeper way.

The second move, however, is lonely. We must move into the silence of the stripped altar and gaping dark. This is the move Christ made into the garden – betrayed by one friend, abandoned by sleeping others, awaiting God’s reply to desperate prayer.

This move is not reaching for my headphones, not turning on my tv, not picking up my phone. This move is allowing my soul to ask God why, journaling, facing my own fears and unanswered prayers. This move looks like stretching out on my bedroom floor, or standing still on a street corner in the rain, or raising up my hands until my arms ache, or fasting. It is finding ways for my body to experience the quiet and uncertainty and darkness that Jesus experienced before me.

Jesus told us we could not follow then, but now, we will. We leave our religious routines, leave our service, and bring only our own souls in silence to face the crucifixion. 

So I seek solitude, and every year, I find that the One who went before me is there in the loneliness. He is there in the depths of death. 

When we embrace that journey with courage, we will follow Him through to Sunday’s sunrise.