The original date of publication for this essay is Sunday, March 28th. It is the 37th of what’s intended to be a year’s worth of essays, published on Sundays. That intention, like everything, is subject to change.
Last week’s essay: On America‘s Roman Forum
Even by the standards of feet…my feet are pretty gross. Athlete’s foot came into my life around the age of four, and when a colony of warts established itself in the callus on my right big toe in high school, the ensuing summer of duct tape and athletic tape left the warts long gone, but replaced them with a toenail fungus as thick and as bad as the worst pictures on those nail treatment boxes at Walgreens.
That might not be an important part of this story.
But it is to me.
It was my last night on the Pacific coast. I had a hotel reservation up in Newport, and the next day I’d be turning in towards Portland, from which I’d drive to Seattle and then slowly, indirectly, back to Illinois, the third leg of the four-part post-college graduation journey complete. I’d been on the water’s edge, more or less, since San Diego, sleeping first at the house of a friend from work, then at the house of my brother’s old roommate, then at a hotel in San Luis Obispo, then at the apartment of a friend from high school, then at a hotel in Eureka, and now, lastly, in Newport. I’d come to San Diego through the desert, heading south through Missouri and Oklahoma to Austin, then west, to Arizona by way of New Mexico by way of West Texas, where, on my way from Pecos to Carlsbad, on a blinding morning there in the deadest land I’ve met, I saw a blue flame rising from a well behind a chain link fence, and I was captivated by it, and I carried from that flame some whispered phrase from God-knows-where about “the desert in my soul.”
I wanted to watch the sun set over the Pacific. I hadn’t yet done this, though I’d driven alongside the pink and gold sky the night I left Los Angeles. As I gamed out what time I’d be leaving the Mexican restaurant in Coos Bay and checked my weather app for the sunset time, I figured I could meet it at what I think was a state park, just shy of an hour ahead on the road. I left the lumber town. I drove north. I pulled into some private road to take a leak behind some trees. I resumed driving. I arrived at the park just in time, but not for the sunset. I arrived at the park just in time to, walking over the crest of the sand dunes, see that a bank of clouds had moved in from the west, and that the sun was already behind them, and that aside from the faint orange line sitting atop the stratus wall, everything—the water, the clouds, even the sand—was a silvery gray.
Disappointment was there, and it was with myself, for having not made this moment a priority, and for not even knowing if this had been avoidable. Had there been a glorious sunset minutes before that I had missed thanks to poor planning? Should I have found a sunset earlier in the week, south of San Luis Obispo, or north of San Francisco? Was this a pretty sunset itself, and had I just forgotten what one looked like? I took a picture on my phone. Just in case.
Stewing in this disappointment, and a bit embarrassed by my drunkenness two nights before and my tardiness on completing an online driving course (something which was due imminently, and was necessary thanks to a lesson weeks prior in Virginia’s harsh approach to speeding), I walked along the edge of the dunes, not happy, but not exactly upset. I was tired, I suppose, and I was attuned not to the joys of the trip—the elation of the drunken night in San Francisco, the hungover meditation across the bay the next afternoon, the Cubs’ walk-off victory on the TV in the Applebee’s in Eureka, the mighty magic of water-carved rocks along the Oregon coast—but to the frustrations. Frustrations not with the trip, but with myself. Frustrations with the desert in my soul.
This was a constant of the trip, to some extent: Long drives alone let you get in your head. It was part of why I was out here doing this. The self-examination felt productive. But it wasn’t always a pleasant experience.
I thought I’d like to touch the ocean. I had yet to do this in the Pacific, at least on this particular trip—I’d neglected to when I’d paid five dollars for parking at a beach in Malibu so I could use its restroom, and I hadn’t yet made it happen in the three days since. But a piece of my frustration wanted to prohibit this: to give up on the imperfect evening; to return to the car; to withhold the reward for not making the experience what I had wanted it to be.
I walked on.
The beach was not vacant, but it was far from full. It was a quiet beach that night, with no birds around—just waves upon waves, surf upon surf. There were a few others out there—a couple or two, an individual or two, a dog or two with one or two of them. The evening had grown chilly; the wind was blowing inwards, as it does, from the sea, holding the array of short, loose hairs back from my ears and my forehead.
It would be dark soon. If I was going to touch the water, now was the time.
I like water. I like significant bodies of water. I like to feel them—with my hands, with my feet, with my forehead. It makes me think of baptism. Back in high school, I would sometimes listen to “Beautiful Day” after it rained. “After the flood, all the colors came out.” It made me feel forgiven. Cleansed. Healed. On particularly guilt-ridden days back then (most often in the spring, for whatever reason), I’d walk down to the lake and dip my head, or take the water in my hands and splash it on my face. This, too, made me feel forgiven. Cleansed. Healed.
Our souls are not deserts. But there are deserts within them. Deserts of sin, by one name, and sadness, by another, and regret in some corners of the map and nostalgia in others. They exist, and we call them many things, and oftentimes we don’t call them by a name at all, or even think much about their presence. They’re a part of our souls. They’re a part of us. Like physical deserts, their borders aren’t always clearly defined. They blur into other parts—the greener parts. The livelier parts.
This was not on my mind as I walked down the dune. It was not on my mind as I slipped off my sandals and gathered them up in one hand. It was not on my mind as I waded out into the water. What was on my mind was a sense of relief, and a slight desire to cry, the way I felt when I was a child and I had the rottenest of days and I was the rottenest of children and my mom or my dad gave me a hug and we got up and did something fun. I was relieved to be in the water, doing the thing I had wanted to do, doing the thing there was no reason not to do save my own compulsion, compulsion born of a guilt for which there was little reason to be guilty—a guilt for something I didn’t even understand enough to know if it was my fault.
And out of this relief, out of this comfort, out of the cold, cold water and the rough, dead sand, some words came through, from the same place “desert in my soul” had come.
I will always wash your feet.
I will always wash your feet.
I will always wash your feet.
I don’t put too much stock, theologically, in how or if one hears the voice of God. Some, I’ve been told, hear it loudly, presently, the way I would hear you speak were you and I together in this room. This was not that. This was quiet. A hint of a thought. My own voice. My own thought, the same way these words are in my thoughts as I write them. I’m sure God could voice my thoughts were that a wish of God’s, and were I quiet enough to listen. I don’t know if this was that or something else.
It doesn’t really matter if the words came from God. It didn’t really matter then, either. They were there, and whether from God or from my personification of Him, they were full and real and true. Because this was not a knew message, nor a new truth. This was something I knew, but in the way of knowing where you can disbelieve, or straight-up forget.
This week, Christians around the world—or at least those who use the Gregorian calendar—will hear of Christ washing His disciples’ feet. Many Catholics will hear it today, as the Passion is read as the Gospel passage for Palm Sunday. Others will hear it Thursday night, at Maundy Thursday services, or on Good Friday in the afternoon, or sometime privately, alone with a Bible. We will hear of Christ kneeling down and washing His disciples’ feet: The humblest parts. The most unsavory parts. The grossest parts of those He loved.
I often thought, and still do think at times, of my little rites with the water as a one-time cleanse. A border between past and future, with sin confined, by the water, to the space across from it. Of course, the sin returns, along with all the rest. The desert gets some rain, but it does not become something other than a desert. The desert remains. It’s still there.
But this is not the message of Maundy Thursday. Or at least, it’s not the message I heard on the beach in Oregon. The message is not Christ gifting upon His beloved a one-time cleaning. It’s not that He washed Peter’s feet. It’s that He washes our feet. Us. Present tense. It’s other things, too—that we must wash one another’s feet, serve one another, love one another at our unholiest—but those do not take away that Christ washes our feet. He meets us, there at our humblest. He meets us, there at our most unsavory. He meets us, there at our grossest. He meets the parts of us that are the most unalive. He meets, and he washes, the deserts in our souls.
There was sand stuck to my feet when I got back to the car, and I drove barefoot up to Newport, my seat heater on, a shiver slowly settling into a warm, sleepy comfort. I had the car’s original carpet floor mats back then, and they were soft beneath my toes, like a towel after a shower.
My feet were not clean, and neither was the desert. But Christ was cleaning them both. And as He said that night, or as I said in some imagined or perceived vocalization of Him…
He still is.
Next week’s essay: On the Mystery
Very, very nice…so much I didn’t realize. Thought-provoking, too.