The bowl and towel of a servant

In the Midwest intimacy is not seemly. Touch is suspect. Perhaps we are dour prudes, sexually repressed to the point where any touch borders on the sensual. Or perhaps we are so emotionally disconnected that touch threatens to break loose emotion and open us up to a world that considers displays of true feeling tasteless and crass. We are most certainly Protestant, shining examples of the areas staunchly Germanic roots.

It is perhaps why some of our congregation sit in angry silence during a Peace that has become more and more boisterous. It is perhaps why some parishioners still offer only a tentative handshake though there are smiles now, and laughter. Growing up I shook hands at the peace, one to my right and one to my left, formal and seemly. I avoided having to make eye contact with anyone. But my own repressed roots gave way under the onslaught of loneliness and an outpouring of genuine love and care that took physical form as effortlessly as breath in another place and time.

A hug becomes an expression of love and acceptance, support and solidarity, comfort and communion. Those who move past their hesitance and let another in close for the first time hug suddenly with abandon. Faces transformed into smiles, arms clasping fiercely. I know a massage therapist who often laments that her therapeutic touch is often the only one the elderly receive. Even her young clients, surrounded by family and loved ones seem starved for it. Simple touch. The truth is we hug our children. We kiss them and tickle them and hold them. But then they pass the age of puberty and find themselves in a new and foreign world where we simply do not touch. The sole exceptions in our lives, those brief moments of intimacy with our lovers. We starve for touch. We, and our communities suffer.

It is a fight of inches, an internal battle to turn back the dour German farmer inside who glowers suspiciously, whispering in the backs of our minds. I had one as well. She was angry and distant and perfectly seemly. It took the bowl and towel of a servant to give her rebirth.

It took a dimly lit church and a hushed crowd. It look a new leader who seemed blind to our discomfort. It took a bowl of cool water. I slid off my shoes, still hidden safely behind the armor of a cassock. The water lapped against my skin, poured over my feet. Hands, warm and nervous. As the one who knelt before me patted my feet dry our eyes met hesitantly, the armor fell away.

I washed three pairs of feet that night. Some whole and neat, others pained and hurting. I looked up into the faces above me and smiled, blinking back tears. Touch and tears. A heart full to bursting in the flickering darkness. Christ knelt beside me, within me. Christ washed with me. Christ washed me.

What could be more seemly? What could be more right? I hugged the souls I washed, clinging tightly. And the old Germanic farmer in the dark and lonely places of my soul cried, and died. And rose again, a new creation, out of the waters of a baptism understood in the bowl and towel of a servant.

Give me your hands friend. Take mine and hold them and smile into my face. Let me see God in your eyes. Touch one another, love one another, hold one another as Christ holds us. And let me never forget the towel and bowl of a servant.