There is a passage in Willa Cather’s novel O Pioneers that I often quote. A character remarks, “There are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before.” Over the years I have offered this quote to retreat and spiritual formation groups. When I ask what they think those two or three stories are about, I write their responses on newsprint or a whiteboard. Without fail, the board fills with essentially the same words and familiar themes. With a few exceptions the words recorded fit into what for me are the three archetypal human stories, namely, stories about love, loss, and liberation.

This evening western Christianity begins its celebration of the Triduum (The Three Days): Holy Thursday to Good Friday, Good Friday to Holy Saturday, Holy Saturday to Easter Sunday. Although it covers three days, essentially Triduum is one long, linked liturgy. For Christians, this is the Liturgy of Life. At the heart of this liturgy are the three classic stories of human experience. Appearing more like three colors in a watercolor painting that wash together than like three separate entities, the liturgies present three interrelated stories that become the one story, the God story, and our story in God: Love-Loss-Liberation. Each of these movements or themes are included in the other two.

Holy Thursday tells the story of LOVE especially symbolized in two great gestures: a meal in which Jesus’ identifies himself with the bread and wine that he offers to his friends and in his dropping to his knees to wash their feet with humility and tenderness. Good Friday tells the story of LOSS and grief and anguish, sadly but historically the age-old consequences of radical love that has a way of fracturing the good order of those in power who alone benefit from that power and that order. The Easter Vigil, beginning on the evening of Holy Saturday moving into Easter Sunday, tells the story of salvation history beginning with the Spirit of God sweeping over the formless void and the face of the deep and culminating in the resurrection of Jesus after being tortured and impaled on a cross until he died. It is the story of LIBERATION by way of LOVE and LOSS.

I often wonder what the church would look like today if our forebears had chosen to emphasize the second action of grace more than the first gesture of Jesus recalled on Holy Thursday. Today, some Catholic Christians refer to themselves or others as “daily communicants” alluding to their daily practice of going to Mass and receiving the Eucharist. But imagine if Christians understood so well and lived so passionately the Story of Love that down through the ages people called us “daily foot washers.” I believe it is the second practice that reveals in mimed poignancy the mystery and meaning of the Eucharist and what Jesus meant when he said, “Do this in memory of me.”

I suspect that Jesus knew that unless he embodied in a tangible, physical action what he meant by “do this” that his follower-friends might mistakenly literalize his words and think it only referred to the ritual of breaking bread and sharing a cup with each other. The second gesture points to the sharing of their lives and the pouring out their love for each other and for those most marginalized and vulnerable who yearned to know that liberating love not loss, that life not death, gets the last word in the story of God.

The second gesture of love — washing the feet of his disciples — links the first gesture of love — the sharing of bread and wine — to a life of loving service. The ministry of the water bowl and towel epitomizes what Jesus meant by the first enigmatic gesture. But just as the water bowl and towel run the risk of becoming ritual artifacts we pull out once a year for a church ceremony that is divorced from its earthy implications, so too Sunday Eucharist runs the risk of becoming for some nothing more than a sanitized, magical, and private devotion. Such a view, at best, is misguided, and at worst, a contradiction of the four-fold actions that are at the heart of the Eucharist and of what we are called to do with our lives each day, namely, receive them gratefully, bless them wholeheartedly, break them willingly or pour them forth liberally, and then share them generously with whomever is in need.

How tame and pro forma our Maundy Thursday services have become since that night when Jesus, the criminal of love, gathered his friends for a meal, food for the body and the soul, food for thought and action. Do this in remembrance of me (Lk. 22:19) Have six more implicating, dangerous, and liberating words ever been spoken? Should not the imperial wizards, totalitarian regimes, corporate monopolists, self-serving ecclesial diehards, and power hungry political autocrats of our day be as threatened and insecure as was Pontius Pilate in his day that Christians might actually take Jesus at his word and action? Do this in remembrance of me. Remember as well that it wasn’t just the person Jesus that the orderlies of the charnel house hoped to kill but that for which he stood, and those most vulnerable and exploited for whom he acted, died, loved, and lived.

So foot washers unite! Let us take to the streets with our water, towels, and bowls! We might put pedicurists out of business (God forbid). Why we might start a movement, “a revolution of the heart” is what Dorothy Day called it. We might work to pass a new amendment in Congress or Parliament or the Tribal Council that proclaims it everyone’s right (maybe duty or privilege or responsibility) to bear bowls and towels and water in public. We could start bowl and towel circles, maybe an association. We could call ourselves– how about Christians or Christ-ones, — yes, after Jesus of Nazareth whom people later called the Christ. I think they called him this less because he was the Anointed One and more because he was the Anointing One who, without discrimination, anointed with radical love those with whom he came into contact. His means of anointing, his instruments of blessing, what those who mocked him saw as his tools of ignorance and weapons of choice, were simple things like bread and wine and water and a bowl and a towel and spit and mud and healing touch and the embrace of grace.

Because he used these things for their most noble purposes, he threatened those who lived their lives for less than noble reasons. So they killed him just as certainly as you and I will suffer the consequences if we take Jesus “too seriously,” if we dare to fracture the good order of those who abuse power, if we dare to leave our house with a bowl and a towel and water of love. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Dan

Artwork: Washing of the Feet by John August Swanson

The Lord Jesus by Gregory Norbet (Copyright 1973, 1981. The Benedictine Foundation of the State of Vermont, Inc.) Performed by Chris Brunelle