They’re our bodies’ beasts of burden, though the hips may argue otherwise.
They leap some of us through our first years of hopscotch and four square, leading us on into uneasy junior high dances and, later, into our first pair of really (and I mean really) sexy heels.
They carry our books and our children.
They get sore, blistered, calloused, cold, dry, cracked, misshapen and broken. And they always get ugly no matter how many pumice stones and pedicures we subject them to.
Perhaps this is why—after a lifetime of carrying the brunt of all we experience—they say that the first place that the body loses life is in the feet, that when you see or feel the warmth of life leave the feet, you know what’s coming soon. It’s as if the feet were beginning that journey elsewhere just a little earlier than the rest of the body.
***
I sat through Maundy Thursday services during Holy Week thinking about what my feet had carried me through in the last year.
As I walked around Paris in February over a year ago, those feet of mine took me through the confusing first days of a possible diagnosis of cancer. They ran out my frustrations as I looked for answers. They were washed by a dear friend last Holy Thursday in Douglas, Arizona…. the next day to tread the profane drag road next to the border wall as I prayed the Stations of the Cross right next to Mexico. From there, they took me for a fifth time from Sásabe to Tucson, safely through that desert. And they marched me right into a hospital for two rounds of surgery not long after.
A year later, bared in a church home far from that desert border, they are still very much alive. They’ve guided me through a valley whose geography I didn’t know or understand.
***
As I was looking at my feet and others,’ the tears of this year wouldn’t stop.
They were in gratitude for my friend Harry and a whole parish who came to my desert to share bread and cup in Tucson and to wash my feet in a small church in Douglas, Arizona.
For a friend’s knowledge of what was ahead for me, and his calm and unwavering guidance.
For my dear ones caring for my bruised and drugged up body as the doctors began to remove the tumors. For my mother’s tears, for my dad’s combing of my hair, for my older sister’s kisses, for my younger sister’s gentle hands as they cleansed my naked and bloated body as I stood uneasily in a first post-surgery shower.
For Matt and Veronica, who nourished me with food and shelter, and sustained my weakness with their own bodies.
For Maxine, Jamie, and Jim whose support from afar made possible the others’ support nearby.
For the doctors’ nimble skills, and for the nurses’ humble gift of healing.
For my friends’ prayers and wishes from the four corners of the earth.
And for my good health.
Those tears, in the end, were tears for all of those blessings, sacred and unending.
***
After five years of walking through the Sonoran desert on the Migrant Trail and after two of my own surgeries, I now know—on a profoundly physical level—that the body needs all the help it can get from the other heads, hearts and minds that surround it.
I have come to know only recently how very vulnerable I am, and that I am—in part—very much of my body. A saint of the desert, Father Bob Carney, has washed my feet now several times as I have finished the Trail’s weeklong journey through the desert. Watching the dust and sweat come off my feet with his gentle touch and the coolness of fresh water against my skin, I cannot help but feel my physicality, and with that, my own mortality. With my friend Dan at my side, I cannot stop the tears.
And when the one who is served turns servant, the message gets squarely driven home. Now, as I approach the care for my loved ones’ bodies—something I had to do in particular for my mother, my sister, and my step-mother this year after their own surgeries—I know that this is a hallowed obligation and blessing. I have cried as I’ve done this for them, too.
***
These strange and wonderful feet of mine are getting ready to walk the desert again. They will trek through an area where many other migrant feet from Central America and Mexico have been. Some migrants will make it to their destination, but some will not. Many will die without the care they so desperately need.
I don’t know them at all, but because of a call I have heard so loudly to care for others, I go to learn and to recount their stories each year. I tell of the need for compassion and love for those unknown migrants in our borderlands whose feet and everything else are dangerously worn out.
***
This year, as I washed the feet of a man I do not know on Holy Thursday, I thought about all of these things. I do not know him, but he is a fellow traveler with me in this world. He is fully human, and, yes, fully mortal. As I washed his feet, I cried those holy tears again.
--Christi Brookes, Easter Sunday, 8 April 2012
