The Miracle

Wednesday April 5. Although I was awake much of the night (10 pm til 3 am) with jet lag, I slept a couple hours before 10 and then five hours after 3 so I ended up with a decent night’s sleep. I was even able to enjoy the long hours awake listening to relaxation tapes, writing my blog, and texting with Chris. 

The main event for today was riding the train back to Glasgow for a Wednesday noon Quaker Meeting. Despite lapsing into my shy and withdrawn state, I was able to enjoy silent meeting (eight of us gathered in a small circle of chairs) and also the lunch afterwards (which came as a delightful surprise). 

The biggest surprise was imagining a visit from Jesus during Meeting. He came and kneeled down at my feet, took off my shoes and washed my feet, blessing and healing them. He told me that healing the sick was not his greatest miracle. His greatest miracle, Jesus said, was being able to give and receive this sort of humble, tender service. He said that, despite everything, every single human being is capable of this - and that is the greatest miracle. Then my imaginary Jesus went around the circle and washed the feet of all the other Quakers worshipping with me. I was very touched by the experience. 

I have never before had much connection with any sort of imagined spirit presence of Jesus (indeed I associate that kind of experience with fundamentalist and right wing Christians, against whom I nurse quite a lot of grievances about what I perceive to be their unsupportive, even hostile, attitudes toward women’s reproductive rights and freedom, as well as rights and freedom for gay, lesbian, trans and other unclassifiably queer folk). 

I think I was led to be open to this imagined visit  from Jesus because of just having reread (on the airplane)the book Daily Prayer with the Corymeela Community by Padraig O Tuama. This was a book I blogged about last year. I found it when I was searching for meditations to use when walking the Stations of the Cross - little altars along the trails in the Dolomites -when we were there last May. Tuama contemplates the Christian story in much the same way as Chris taught me to contemplate Greek myths - as ancient stories with the capacity to mirror and deepen our own experiences. 

My imaginary Jesus takes for granted both that miracles of healing can and do happen (as in all his healing of the sick, lame, blind, even raising of the dead) AND that those miracles aren’t always going to be there when we are most in need of them (as in Father, why hast thou forsaken me?)

 But the real miracle, the one we can always count on (my imagined Jesus tells me) is that some human beings sometimes - including sometimes we ourselves - are capable of humble loving kindness. This is the real miracle, he says, the miracle that makes all the difference. Meaning for me in this situation that my feet may (or may not) let me walk the trail, but that along the way I will receive and give this kind of simple humble human kindness. Tuama in his meditations on the stations of the cross focuses our attention on the very small and modest kindnesses Jesus receives while carrying the cross, and while repeatedly falling under its weight. 

This imagined foot washing by Jesus made me more keenly aware of the hotel receptionist going out of her way to try to help me when both the hotel wifi and my phone coverage lost access to the internet all afternoon today (I had taken for granted the internet would be available to check on buses and plan my escape routes if and when I can’t walk the whole day tomorrow). She also went out of her way to help when I realized I wouldn’t be able to set out my suitcase for the luggage transfer people tomorrow at 8am (given that I hope to begin my hike at 5:30am so I get to walk through the transition from darkness to dawn.) I realized that the receptionist’s desire to help me, when she had so much to do for so many people, was exactly the miracle Jesus was talking about. I felt that way also about the waitress at the restaurant next door - where I went and had the exact same dinner I enjoyed so much yesterday (beef pie, mashed potatoes, chopped salad - this is the one picture I did take today!) 

When I told the waitress that I would be leaving before breakfast (which was prepaid as part of my hotel reservation) she brought me two little yogurts and two fresh bananas, so that I can have a breakfast to carry with me. These acts of kindness reverberate with the scene of Jesus going around the room at the Quaker meeting, sitting on the floor at each of our feet, removing our shoes, removing our socks, and quietly washing our feet. 

So now let me pause and add each of you who is reading this now to my imagined circle, so that your feet too are being washed by Jesus. Along with the foot washing is a prayer that you and I be able to walk wherever we dream of going in this life - and also a prayer that whether or not our feet can carry us where we want to go, whether we walk or whether we fall, this miracle of humble human kindness will be there to comfort and to console us. 

Now - to go off on in altogether different direction - I have been thinking about this walk as a psychoanalytic pilgrimage. I was trying to come up with a topic for a paper for the annual IFPE (international foundation for psychoanalytic education) conference that Chris and I enjoy attending together. The theme for 2023 is “…but is it psychoanalytic?” As I played with the theme I liked the idea of exploring what psychoanalysis means to me (which is based more on my many years of daily analysis with the imagined spirit presence of Professor Sigmund Freud than on theory or scholarly reading). 

My sense of psychoanalysis is summed up in the first words my imagined Professor Freud said to me (when I was wrestling with a thousand murky feelings like shame and guilt in my relationship with my mother, just after she first visited me on Orcas Island and I drove her to the ferry so late that she had to run, with a painfully compromised hip and a heavy suitcase, just in time to have them lift the already lowered thingy that blocks the road so that she could stagger aboard the nearly departed ferry). Freud’s words that first visit were “Just say whatever comes into your mind. Don’t censor anything.” They were repeated again and again throughout our analysis. 

If I try to transplant Freud’s words from the context of analysis to that of pilgrimage I get something like this “Just welcome whatever or whomever crosses your path. Don’t push aside anything or anyone.” It’s very interesting because in analysis one’s conscious word-speaking self listens to the parts of the self that don’t speak the language of conscious words - one’s feelings, sensations, dreams, involuntary thoughts, humor - and tries to engage in a conversation with them. As my  trusted other, my  analyst, Freud communicated a kind of love with his calm listening presence. He communicated that every part of me whatever comes into my attention is worth listening to. He helped me find the strength and courage to look at whatever parts of myself arose. 

 On a pilgrimage my attention is outward, toward the world, and the circumstances and people I meet. My job is to listen to them as an analyst would. Or perhaps to kneel down and wash their feet? 

What might Professor Sigmund Freud the psychoanalyst and Jesus washing peoples’ feet have in common? Jesus said to me that the real sense in which he is a savior is the sense in which we all are saviors. When we succeed at small humble acts of kindness (which we pray, as Tuama prays in one of his meditations, will actually turn out to be kind) we save each other from despair, we rekindle faith in our own human capacity for kindness. 

Thank you for reading this and walking with me (whether we walk or whether we fall).  Your walking with me by reading these posts fills me with the same warm gratitude and rekindled faith that I felt when my imagined Jesus was washing my feet.