footwasher
I wash Adam’s feet almost every day, soaking the diabetic’s precious, never-ending walk, his steady, vulnerable progress, in tender keeping, using a home remedy I found online, a mixture designed to slough off dead skin and soften calluses. You wouldn’t believe it maybe, but mouthwash features in the short list of ingredients, and so, the air around the healing place smells bright and antiseptic.
Kevin makes jokes; tells Adam his feet will soon be minty fresh.
Meanwhile, I think about something I heard many years ago in a hospital, that our bodies absorb more than dirt drawn into the mouth and nose, on our fingers, through the bottoms of our feet, because this place where we live is filthy. Riley had been a chunky baby then, toddling around the chairs in the waiting room on bare feet.
A nurse had gestured toward her chubby, curling toes, had said kindly, “These floors are so dirty—hospitals truly are, and you can get sick just walking around here.” You’ll want to keep her feet clean.
Young mama me had snatched my baby up and covered her new, pink skin with socks, because I knew then that the healing places, the cleansing pools, especially, teem with antagonists.
There’s an image from scripture I just can’t get out of my mind—a blind man waiting for healing, the spit of a Savior dripping down his cheeks like tears. I think of this every time I touch Adam’s feet. A person can’t get much clearer about the real situation then having blackened, calloused feet, then having spit for tears.
Christ, explaining His ministry of irreligious hang outs with sinners, once said, “It’s not the healthy who need a doctor but the sick,” identifying Himself, eternally the very best of the footwashers, as the doctor. He said, to borrow from the Message paraphrase, I’m here inviting the sin-sick, not the spiritually-fit.
Truth is, walking for miles through the shadowlands leaves us all in need of a good foot soak, but no one shows up for it, to wait on the healing, unless they know how much they need it. It’s not that the self-righteous have healthier skin, just that we’ve stopped feeling the hardness in our own hearts.
Adam finds me now, pinning me with his eyes, and paces a line in front of me, murmuring like a prophet, “Soak your feet. Soak your feet.”
He knows our routine, the baptism of the feet in healing water, the lingering for full effect. He knows that when the timer sounds, time comes to dip into a second warm water bath. He knows, because of this time we spend together, that caring and healing happen slowly, as an intimate process, although I would not be surprised if he does not completely understand why I require this stillness of him every day, why I keep spreading the towel and drawing him down into the chair on repeat.
But here’s the thing: Jesus could have healed that blind man with a single word, but instead, chose a gradual healing involving multiple touches, His holy fingers wet in runnels of saliva, the blind eyes blurry before they cleared, the man leaning in for healing, because for as long as we move about in healing places, we can only live in relationship to Him. We need Him to keep touching our blind eyes, his hands to keep cradling, keep washing, our filthy feet.
Adam smiles down at me while I scrub gently against the bottom of his feet with a rag, while I rinse and then dry them. He laughs as I rub lavender lotion into the rough spots where the dead cells have begun to peel away in tiny flecks, as though he has, this whole time of tending, of waiting on me waiting on him, been teetering on the fine edge of joy. He’s ticklish where his skin feels new and very nearly numb where thick calluses muffle sensation. The calluses are, of course, more significant to my mind than the dirt, since devastating, brooding infections—destroying things—can hide beneath them. I can be patient; it will take hundreds of water baths, thousands of touches, to achieve any noticeable difference.
Where have these deep dead places come from, these layers, old and dry? Only the miles Adam has traveled, going nowhere far but living, cutting invisible paths up and down our hallways, around the kitchen island, the table, the doorways between our living room and my office, over to the front windows. Autism keeps Adam always on the move, a nomad outrunning overwhelm.
I test the split skin around his toes now, my fingers glossed with salve, remembering the time I came downstairs, and Adam, who had tried and given up on finding me, had begun without me. He had splashed some mouthwash in a shallow bowl and jammed a foot inside. He looked up, watchfully, and I smiled at what he knew and what he didn’t, how he thought he could manage his part and mine. His feet would have smelled the same, but they would surely not have shed as many ugly layers. They might have been only partially dry, and then the lotion, while there, would not have been worked into the hardest places. When it comes to self-care, Adam doesn’t have my attention to detail, nor the depth of my intention to heal, nor the love, even for himself, that propels my hands.
My fingers graze a tender, ticklish place on the bottom of his foot and he laughs, looks at me with glittering eyes, resting his foot gently in my palm.
This comes to me with the memory, how funny it is that sometimes I think my spiritual formation depends mostly on me; how I can fill my anxious disconnection with a sloppy-rough approximation of devotional behaviors; how I think I can manage my part of this slow and intimate exchange and His. I can treat my own need for His touch, for His attentive, cleansing hands, like a list of things for me to do instead of an invitation to come with my dirt and my calluses and wait on Him while He waits on me, leaning in for healing.
