My feet were clean enough to suit me, so I didn’t go up front to get them washed like other people at church did that night.
I was just fine where I was on the back pew, stuck somewhere between preaching and picking, sinning and snoring, with no plans to take off my shoes.
The back pew was as far away from the pulpit as I could get and still be inside a building where women’s purses smelled like Juicy Fruit — a cinder block tabernacle where the song service was loud and the sermons long.
Since my only church experience was in the holy-roller ways, I knew what a “foot washin’” involved. I witnessed one up close once when I was young and curious.
Back then, I didn’t realize how important that ritual was. I figured the adults just didn’t want to wash their own feet. “Been walkin’ in the chicken yard barefooted,” I surmised.
Now I know that foot washing, among other things, is an act of humility. In life, humility is important. It is a component of wisdom.
During that first experience, I sat on the front pew to get a better view as two lines of shoeless shouters stood at the front of the sanctuary. One line was for men (the Old Spicers), the other for women (the Avoners). Back then, there were no unisex foot washing lines because, in a small town, rumors can get out of hand in a hurry.
In one line stood pulpwooders and house painters. In the other line stood homemakers wearing no ear bling and hands covered in okra stings. But both lines had one thing in common: the promise of a bus ticket to Glory. From my inexperienced perspective, all they had to do to hang onto that ticket was live right, occasionally wash somebody’s feet, and not talk bad about sister so-in-so when she sang flat or dipped a little snuff.
At the front of each line was a wash pan half-full of water and a chair. The first person in line would sit in the chair, put his or her bare feet in the bucket and the next person in line would wash the sitting sinner’s feet. Then, they’d exchange places and repeat until everyone in line had a turn.
Somebody always brought an extra bucket of water in case someone got happy and stomped the water out of his or her bucket.
Back then, I sat up close to get a good look.
This time, I stayed on the back pew.
By now, I was a young man with girls and guitars on my mind, worried that Daddy would not let me use the car again because the mechanic said “somebody” had been spinning the tires on that ’67 Bel Air. And Daddy didn’t think it was because Mama was squealing off in the IGA parking lot.
I know I had people praying for me, sincere people whose voices God recognized because He’d heard them before; people who the church ceiling didn’t threaten to fall on or would burst into flames when they walked into the building.
As an 18-year-old lugging around the scent of Hai Karate and uncertainty, I needed that prayer. Running through my veins, I had the clashing blood of holiness preachers, cotton pickers, and honky tonk singers. I was primed to one day have at least two new commandments chiseled in my honor. I would be famous — Sunday School teachers would warn kids about me.
If I remember right, I had two girlfriends—one in one town, another in another. I was on a path to follow the “shall not” example set by other musicians I was running with. Like the old joke said, they were frank and earnest with the ladies: Frank in one town, Ernest in the other. “Boys will be boys” was our time-honored excuse.
As a child, the rule was to “be home before the sun goes down.” That was on its way to being replaced by “be home before the sun comes up.”
Back then, my mind needed a good washing more than my feet.
But I think I would be a little wiser now if I had taken off my shoes then, walked up front, and washed a pulpwooder’s feet.
