Maundy Thursday

Mother, Washing Dishes by Susan Meyers
She rarely made us do it—
we’d clear the table instead—so my sister and I teased
that some day we’d train our children right
and not end up like her, after every meal stuck
with red knuckles, a bleached rag to wipe and wring.
The one chore she spared us: gummy plates
in water greasy and swirling with sloughed peas,
globs of egg and gravy.

Or did she guard her place
at the window? Not wanting to give up the gloss
of the magnolia, the school traffic humming.
Sunset, finches at the feeder. First sightings
of the mail truck at the curb, just after noon,
delivering a note, a card, the least bit of news.

On Holy Thursday, I kneel down on the cool hard floor of the sanctuary before a small basin of water. I take a stranger’s feet into my palms.  With my small hands I tip the heavy pitcher of water, and with great care, I wash these feet. I dry them.

And every year when I am through, I look up at a warm, humble smile. And for a brief, still moment, I offer one too.

I would never want to give that up.

Sabbath

“I haven’t written on the blog in so long,” I told my partner a few weeks ago. “I feel bad about it. But it just wasn’t coming to me–and lately, when the words come, I simply can’t get myself to sit still and write them. I don’t know what’s wrong with me!”

“No reason to feel bad about it,” he said, matter-a-factly. “Even God took a break.”  Even God took a break.

Indeed, at the conclusion of the first creation narrative in Genesis 1, God takes a break–a seventh day sabbath.  Surely, God’s break warrants my own respite from the creation process, right?  This was consoling for a time…until the guilt began to encroach upon my psyche again.  ”God took a break after doing something,” I told myself. “I haven’t done any writing at all lately!  And what’s more, God didn’t just create something. God created something ‘very good‘!” This logic only brings me right back to where I began.

This swirling mess of self-justification and degradation so often frames my daily reflection on life–not just my blogging life. If I’m not bemoaning my lazy writing practice, then it’s my inability to keep up with my growing email inbox or to-do lists, or my desire to work harder or fast or better, or harder and faster and better. The more I indulge this mindset, the more I find myself trapped in a world of insatiable demands.  This cannot be the “very good” world that God created…right?

“I feel like I’m drowning,” I recently said this to someone on a particularly overwhelming day of tasks. It’s something I have said a hundred times before on a hundred other days like that one, but on that day the figurative image flashed before me: my arms flailing about, splashing water everywhere, grasping for air.  Suddenly, I said to the drowning image of me, “Don’t you know that once you stop, you will float?”

It takes great courage to float–to believe that our survival does not depend on our own capacity to sustain ourselves.  Such a risk stands in opposition  to the myth of the self-made man that dominates the “American dream.”  That is a dream of insatiable demands. But that’s not the “very good” world I want to live-into anyways.

The great Jewish thinker Abraham Joshua Heschel wrote, “The world was brought into being in the six days of creation, yet its survival depends upon the holiness of the seventh day.”  I’m trying to live like this–to live out the belief that my creation, my own hard work, will not alone sustain my survival. Sometimes, we all need to rest–to float–until the gentle current pulls us into another space of creativity again.

A Thirsty Lent

My friends over at The Church Is Alive invited me to post as a guest blogger during their Lenten fundraiser campaign to raise $5000 to build a water well in Africa.  Check out my post, “A Thirsty Lent“, and contribute to their fundraising effort if you are so inclined…