Maundy Thursday - beyond the comfort zone

I'm trying to get over a period of not having gone to church. I'm it sure how it happened, but I realised recently that suddenly not going to church had become as normal to me as going had quite recently been.

I went to morning prayer at St Gallicus the other day and admitted this, whereupon Revd Cantiana deftly defused a potentially difficult situation with on of Christendom's best weapons - hilarity. She remarked that I'd been to church twice on two consecutive days and, given that they wanted to hold on to me, proposed chaining me to a pew.

For me the Maundy Thursday Eucharist has always been the most powerful of the church's year, because it celebrates Jesus's kingship over all things, including the most elusive and unforgiving - time: it is a memorial of the first Eucharist, where Jesus offered himself as paschal victim on the Cross to the Father the day before he was crucified.

Cantiana had indicated that she wanted to wash my feet beforehand, so I scraped out the mushrooms between my toes (a shame: it looked like being a bumper crop this year). She spoke about her first experience of washing feet, which had taken her out of her "comfort zone". I have to admit I was also out of my own, because I've never had my feet washed by a woman before. I'm pathologically Glaswegian in that I'm not all that much into being touched.

Her touch was loving, soft and gentle, and, I think, gave me an insight into the discomfort the Apostles must have felt when Jesus - the Son of God who united all humankind (read Luke 1:26-38 alongside a basic genetics textbook) - washed their feet. Cantiana's leaving us soon. I'm not quite sure where she's going, but I think it'll be a better place soon.