On Soles and Souls

You can tell a lot from feet. About a person and about a culture.

I thought about this while I was staring at feet, hundreds, maybe a thousand pairs of feet standing in the dust on Good Friday. We were following the Way of the Cross, in the hot mid-afternoon sun, stopping 14 times to remember the day Christ was crucified. We stopped in front of pictures that hung around the public square, while young people gave pointed and relevant reflections through a megaphone. The message we heard was: Christ carries a cross for all who are sick, hungry, cheated, or oppressed today, and in this place.

But because I couldn't understand the Creole words very well, as the megaphone dispersed them into the square, I was studying people's feet. I saw the roads and fields had worked their way into their soles—a tough layer of dead skin and dirt that became a leathery shoe itself. Some feet had sores, others scars. Bare feet, flattened from running the rocky paths, had been stuffed into plastic sandals: two dollars a pair, three colors, four styles, split, dirty, too small. Heels hung over here, there callused toes stuck out of the edges. Sometimes the shoes were too big. A little girl's feet stopped midway into pumps that some mission-minded lady from the United States had discarded into a relief barrel.

I guess I see the ministry here as caring for the homelier feet of this world. Christ did it by foot washing and set the example. The night before Good Friday, Jesus stripped to the waist, knelt like a slave, and washed the feet of his disciples.

Looking at people's feet here, I realize what a dirty job that was. Jesus washed feet that had pounded the rocky, dusty trails for miles. He probably muddied the basin as he rubbed the calluses and soaped away the top layer of dirt.

I wonder if he thought of the hard days ahead for those whose feet he washed. In a space of 24 hours, two of their number would be dead, one by grisly public torture, the other a suicide. Was Jesus thinking how confused they would be at the events of the next day, Good Friday? He knew how imperfect those men were, how helpless before the catastrophes about to overtake them. He commanded them, nonetheless, to witness his authority with mutual acts of radical service.

As things were tough for the original disciples, so things are tough for the people I live among. I once heard a priest say, "The people here live Good Friday ... every day. It touches something deep in the soul of people here." He continued, "The problem is, they never get beyond it, to Easter."

"People here live Good Friday"—an apt description. Evil seemed to win the day on Good Friday, as news for the disciples worsened, and the sky itself darkened. Good Friday, in this sense, does seem the common experience of my neighbors. Bewildering evil forces pile up the odds against survival in a life without much hope of material change.

A system of degradation permeates people's lives here in a thousand ways. Well-educated, smooth talkers forge land papers to defraud illiterate peasants of their land. Loan sharks charge sky-high rates for credit. Voodoo doctors exploit fear at a high price. Men treat women as objects of pleasure who can also do work for them. Poor children live in virtual slavery to the richer families that can feed them better than their own families.

The army often supports officials who enforce their orders through arbitrary arrests and beatings. Sometimes the officials and enforcers together bully the peasants to do garden work, cut wood, or do road construction for them.

Medicines rarely reach hospitals because officials can get a better price on the black market. Adult literacy programs are a scandal, and the adult literacy rate remains the lowest in the hemisphere, 10 to 20 percent. The education system teaches kids to repeat rather than to think.

Like Good Friday for the disciples, as dark as things seem now in Haiti, in some ways they are getting worse. Oppression, mistrust, and increasingly scarce resources work in complex patterns that indeed create a world where the forces of evil seem to be winning. It is no wonder that Good Friday, the series of bewildering disasters that overtook the disciples, seems to touch something "deep in the soul of these people."

HOW CAN I minister as a disciple here? How can I honor those with whom I walk the way of the cross? How will people be better off because of the intentions of a college graduate who has spent a year walking with her foot in a bucket of foreign clumsiness? I don't know. But I think part of the answer is in foot washing—giving dignity to the homely, pain-deadened members of the body that surround us. Of course it's not just feet. The key to our work is to honor people, to honor souls.

Foot washing demands that we overcome squeamishness about serving. Squeamishness can mean, simply, nausea: gut-level revulsion at the way poverty can disfigure a body, at the sight of a farmer whose infected arm inflates to twice the normal size, or a baby with chronic diarrhea whose body holds liquid like a leaky plastic bag. When Jesus washed the feet of his disciples though, he challenged us to get beyond the outward image and honor souls in acts of human fellowship.

Foot washing demands we be willing to receive as well as give. A couple of months ago, I stood in line behind the town water spigot waiting for the chance to rinse my feet. When I got to the spigot, really not more than a trickle, the woman kneeling there waiting for her bucket to fill up startled the life out of me. Before I knew what was happening, she had splashed water on my shins and rubbed the grit off my ankles. Then she turned her nearly full bucket upside down to give my feet a final good rinsing.

Peter protested when Christ washed his feet, and I think I understand why. Her spontaneous act of kindness left me amazed as I walked away, and she put the empty bucket under the pipe to wait again.

What do we see, then, in these homely acts of mutual service? If we wash each others' feet, we are witnesses to God's presence among us. The God who proved ultimate authority over the evil that seemed to win the day, showed love with an act of service. God who was alive in the world of work and suffering, walking among people with dusty, callused feet, had served them by washing those feet.

Surely that is the crux of the hope in which we work. The Lord lived, and lives among us, in acts of radical service. As we follow Christ's example, our acts of foot washing with eyes of faith are one way we can get beyond the despair of Good Friday to the celebration of Easter.

Rebecca Dudley was a community worker with Mennonite Central Committee in Mombin Crochu, Haiti, when this article appeared.