Feet-Grab
by
Martha Bourlakas
Jesus did not need
to see us with cell phones to know how humans would behave in 2021. The Son of
God knew from the get-go how easily distracted we are, how we procrastinate the
hard work of loving in favor of busy-ness, how it can be easier to lose our eyes
in a screen than to have an eye-to-eye conversation. He knew we need pointed
actions and stories to make us listen and attend to the larger, urgent love
narrative. In today’s Gospel, Jesus knows he does not have much time left, so
he must synthesize his lessons. To teach his most critical commandment— Love one another as I have loved you—he
gets intimate. He holds and cleans us where we are most dirty, most callused,
most vulnerable: our feet.
During the pandemic quarantine, our family watched a lot
of scary movies together. Our ritual—selecting the movie, popping the popcorn,
digging up Junior Mints from the candy drawer, turning off the lights, lighting
candles—seemed trivial at first, but then meaning appeared. The world outside
our doors was suddenly so frightening and unpredictable that our grown children
and their parents needed intense stories and characters to help us step away
from reality, if only for two hours.
One of the horror movie tropes is the feet-grab. As soon
as the protagonist is down on the floor, especially near a bed, under which
scary demon-character hides, you know what’s coming … she is going to have her
feet grabbed, and will be pulled rapidly into the void. No no, no, we scream,
it’s your only chance! Get up, run away! As if we hadn’t experienced this plot
point over and over, our family clung to each other. We squeezed each others’
arms, held hands, covered each others’ eyes, and laughed at our fears.
The movie feet-grab allowed us much-needed intimacy with
each other, the only humans in our immediate worlds, the only people we weren’t
seeing through screens. Our daughters, like so many, quickly forced away from
their close friends and boyfriends by the pandemic, had lost human touch, and
needed a safe way to cling. How critical touch and intimacy are to our
psychological-emotional development. What a loss not to be able to touch and
hold.
In
this Maundy Thursday Gospel, Jesus knows the immediate future is going dark,
that he is being pulled into a horrible human void. Jesus illustrates his
urgent love lesson, stops us cold, by holding our feet. He does not focus on
our bony bunions, but looks us in the eye and washes us in humility and love.
Cling to each other, he says, for it is in the intimacy, the love, you will
find your way out of the darkness.
Living
Well Through Lent 2021
Copyright
©2021 Scott Stoner.
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rights reserved.
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