Holy Thursday

Holy Thursday service was tonight. It's always one of the most powerful services of the year for me, often actually more so than Good Friday. I think there are two reasons for that: the foot washing and the stripping of the altar.

I like the way my church has done the foot washing the past couple years. Everyone has their feet (well, foot) washed by a parishioner and then takes a turn washing the feet of the next person. (We have three chairs and basins so that this doesn't take all night). That way you get to experience both aspects – the vulnerability of having your feet washed and the symbolic experience of washing someone else's feet.

The sermon tonight discussed what for me is a really important aspect of the ritual: the fact that having someone wash your feet is in some ways hard – more generally, the fact that being open to intimacy and vulnerability is hard. In my case, I'm normally not into being touched by strangers – I've begged off of getting pedicures with more “girly” family members, I have no interest in seeing a massage therapist, and I don't even get my hair shampooed when I go in for a haircut. And it's not a personal space issue or a hygiene issue – it's absolutely an intimacy issue. I don't know what to say or how to behave when someone I don't know is dealing very concretely with my body. For me it's different with friends, but for a lot of our culture it isn't – we don't touch people and we don't expect to be touched, and I think that's part of what makes the foot washing act so powerful.

Washing someone else's feet is the easy part. But every year, I challenge myself to stay present while I'm having my feet washed. To really be there and not zone out to somewhere safer. To allow myself to feel and even enjoy the sensations of warm water, soft sponge, and fluffy towel. To look into the eyes of the person who's washing my feet and accept the fact that they're doing this voluntarily as well, to affirm that we are part of a community, part of a family even, and that in some way we do love one another, even if we don't know each other's names. The fact that the foot washing is in no way sexual doesn't change the fact that it is intimate. And like many things in the church, the symbolic act is practice for the “real” one, in this case, practice for being vulnerable, for taking the risks of opening our hearts and exposing our weaknesses – and for patiently and lovingly caring for others in their vulnerability.

After the foot washing and Eucharist are over, the Holy Thursday service ends with the stripping of the altar. The clergy, after removing their vestments so that they're dressed all in black, take away the Communion cups and plates, remove the crosses and candles and prayer books, put away the cushion from the altar rail, and fold up the altar cloth, leaving the altar bare. This time and Good Friday are the only times in the year when the congregation sees the altar without a cloth, the only time the clergy are in black, the only time the church looks so empty.

Watching one of the priests taking out an armful of books tonight, I thought that it almost looked as if they were fleeing, gathering up what they could and abandoning the church. (Of course this is not to say that our clergy would do anything of the sort – it's a reflection on the evocative power of the liturgy, not on the character of the priests!) I think that abandoned look helps to put us in the place of the disciples when Jesus was arrested and killed. They didn't know Easter was coming. As far as they knew, their friend and teacher who they loved was gone forever. Obviously the sense of sadness evoked by a stripped altar is nowhere close to the pain of seeing a friend taken away and tortured, but that empty feeling helps us to remember what they experienced, to slow down and think about what it meant.

Part of the reason I love all the beauty of my church is that it gives a sense of sacred space. The colors and the stained glass and the decorations all tell me that God is there in a special way. They don't cause God to be there – God is there regardless of how a church is decorated or whether there's a church at all. But they help me as a mortal creature to get some small sense of the wonder and beauty of God. So on Good Friday, when the altar is empty and the clergy are in black and I don't have all those reminders, it helps me to remember and reflect on the fact that humanity killed God, and that God allowed it. Of course God is still here on Good Friday, and of course God still existed after Jesus died also – but there's also that sense of God being absent that echoes Jesus' cry of “Why have you forsaken me?” God came to earth, lived among us, gave Himself to us, and we killed him or betrayed him or denied him or claimed he wasn't our responsibility or stood aside or didn't understand. And of course Easter happened, and in a few days we'll be thinking about that, but it isn't time yet.