A couple of nights ago Japhia and I lucked into "The African Queen" on TV -- the Hepburn / Bogart movie in which she plays Rose Sayer, a prim, proper, steely-willed Methodist missionary of a burned-out mission, and he, a crude, earthy, good-hearted captain of a broken-down river steamboat -- in which, of course, they each are drawn beyond their boundaries to fall in love and live swimmingly (a little different from happily) ever after.
Typical plot (because isn't that how life at its best goes, no matter how sweetly and over-simplistically it's sometimes presented?), but what caught me in this story is the precise hinge-point when Rose's stiff separation and Charlie's gruff self-protection start to be undone. Charlie suffers an injury to his foot, and both he and Rose sit down so she can take his bare foot in her lap, hold it in her hands, and see what she can do to make it better.
I wonder if the utter boundary-breaking intimacy and tenderness of a moment like that is the reason why when I googled (yes, I just used it as a verb) ... when I googled "The African Queen movie images" it was probably the only major scene for which there is only a single, unfortunately-copyrighted image available. Or maybe Google and the majority of people who have captured and posted images from the movie just don't see it as all that important a moment.
But to any self-respecting biblical scholar and student, it's obviously a foot-washing scene and a key part of any holy-week movement towards death and new life.
It's the intimate tenderness of caring for Charlie's foot that draws Rose out of herself and into knowing her love for Charlie. And maybe that's why Jesus first modeled such an action for his disciples and then commanded them to do likewise for one another after he was gone.
After his death and their failure to stay with him in his time of need, they could so easily have each been locked up in their own self-judgment and sense of failure and shame that they would have drifted apart. Leaderless, they easily could have lost focus and cohesion, and returned one by one to their old ways of living, and bit by bit their emergent kingdom-community would have disappeared.
But as much as they followed the command to wash one another's feet and would bend by sheer force of obedient will to meet one another's need, they would be drawn out of the prison of their own self-judgment, and beyond the boundaried comfort of their own old little world, again and again into the kind of self-sacrificing and self-enlarging love that Jesus had shared with them, and had helped them to learn to live themselves.
Often it really does take a command like this -- the command to wash your neighbour's feet, to draw us out, and into the kingdom of love that awaits. At least it does for me.
There are so many things that so easily keep me locked up against the community of love, whether that be the company of grand-children, conversation and times together with old friends, or even quiet, open, close times with my wife and children. Busy-ness with "good work," anxiety about my own inadequacy, fear of being vulnerable or being caught off-guard or appearing foolish ... they all conspire against love.
Until a grandchild stands in front of me with a book in hand, asking to be read a story. Until an old friend risks talking with me about his depression. Until my wife is ill and needs some help, or my son calls up and says he is alone and afraid and needs someone to talk to.
And then as I sit down with whoever it is, take their bare and bruised feet in my lap, and simply do what I can to wash and soothe them, I am drawn beyond whatever holds me back, am led out beyond the boundary of self-protection, and am welcomed into the country of love.
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