Several of us recently (at an Altar Guild pot-luck supper) fell into a conversation with Hartshorn about Maundy Thursday and about the foot-washing that's the focus of that evening's service. Most of us felt uncomfortable about the ritual, expressed in a variety of reactions: Embarrassment about one's own feet; disgust about feet in general; feelings about it being just too intimate. One person said, "We just don't do that. Back in Jesus' time, people took off their sandals and washed their feet−or had them washed for them−when they entered a house; we don't do that."

I, on the other hand, have valued this ritual, almost more than any other in our church. Which isn't to say that I didn't have the same feelings of discomfort the first time I participated. I did. But Peter and I had returned to church, having been away for decades--it was Holy Week, 1994, the last week of our first Lent at St. Augustine's--and we were curious about it all and so did it all. So much had changed in the Episcopal Church since we'd last been members. There was an openness−exchanging the peace each Sunday, for example−that hadn't been part of the Episcopal Church we'd each grown up in. Let alone, washing other people's feet.

Sure, I was nervous about what the foot-washing would be like. I probably washed my feet at home before we left for church! But there was nothing to worry about; it was safe. No, we don't do this in our culture, but that didn't matter. In fact, perhaps it's because it's so foreign to us that it's so powerful. Just as the imposition of ashes on our foreheads on Ash Wednesday is a powerful gesture. Hartshorn quoted a former associate rector at St. A's as having once said about such rituals, "Matter matters." Such acts make real for us the abstract, whether it's our mortality or our Christian call to service.

Some years at St. A's, members of the clergy have washed parishioners' feet; other years, we've washed each other's feet. In John 13, there's precedent for both: Jesus washes the feet of the disciples, setting an example of servanthood which gets reenacted in the clergy's washing our feet. Yet afterwards, Jesus says to his disciples, "So if I, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another's feet."

Many of us are actually more comfortable washing someone else's feet than we are having it done for us. We'll pay money to get a pedicure, yet wince at someone caring for our feet out of their own desire to give. Sitting on the little stool before the altar, watching someone's hands wash my feet, one at a time, in warm soapy water in a small plastic tub, I had to put my nervousness aside and surrender to a gift of loving service.

It was worth it. At the end, when we hugged, I felt there was a tacit agreement that we both wanted to grow in love toward all peoples of the earth. It was just a couple of minutes, a brief encounter, but a moment on my spiritual journey so memorable that I hope I can persuade others to try it this Maundy Thursday, as Jesus asked us to do.