The Towel and Basin

The Discipline of Surrender, Doulas Webster, Chapter 7

Just this morning I was asking the Lord for a heart of humility. Not exactly that. But a heart that can appreciate and live into humility. I think humility is needed so we can breath in all that God is doing in our life. Else we mis it.

Humility was absent with Peter. He refused to simply "be" in the midst of what God was doing in his life. In this case, he was hidden from the greater mystery ("... the full extent of [Jesus's] love". Jn. 13:1) and forced to deal with the awkwardness of his Rabbi washing his feet with a lesson that has endured thousands of years. I want to be like that. Not like Peter. But like a person who is continuously and deeply reflective of all that God is doing around me, if I am indeed graced with the ears to hear and eyes to see.

Question: Is it easier for you when someone washes your feet (speaking parabolically here) or when you wash the feet of others? 

Webster states on p.69 that the caring for the practical, daily needs of others is equated with washing the feet of others. 

At the homeless breakfast on Saturday there was a woman who was holding a card dear to her chest. She was smiling. I asked her about the card and her face lit up with the story of how she was on the bus when a man invited her to sit next to her. She took the seat and noticed he was writing out a greeting card. He signed it, licked the envelope, and gave it to her, just before getting off the bus. She showed me the card. It was an Easter card. In it he wrote that God loved her. That she was his child. And that, through the power of the resurrection, it would all work out. That man washed that woman's feet. Not through the tools of towel and basin, but through the tools of pen and paper. 

We could all do that.

As baptized Christians we have been washed with towel and basin. Remember it? It wasn't the washing of hands to justify our behavior (like Pilate). No. We have been washed by Jesus himself through baptism and "marked as Christ's own forever". There was a basin. And there was a towel. So, for us anyway, our challenge may be to wash others in the same love wherein we have been washed, to comfort with the same comfort wherein we have been comforted, to weep with those who weep, and rejoice with those who rejoice. But not with hearts that are cold and akin to "just doing the right thing". Anyone could do that. God calls us to do all that stuff with hearts of humility. Why? When we do things with hearts of humility it allows God's love to be transferred through the doing of the thing. Surrendering to a heart of humility enables God's love to be received and given in a way that the essence of heaven is revealed to all who are present. Without love it everything we do is all just a wash.

"Unless I wash you, you have no part with me" (Jn. 13:8). What does that mean for us today?