washing feet
Instacart employee Eric Cohn,searches for an item for a delivery order in a Safeway grocery store. Image via REUTERS/Cheney Orr
How strange that to love our neighbor we must abstain from interacting with them in the flesh. Maintain social distance, and for the love of God, don’t go to Grandma’s house. These are all wise admonitions, but is that it? Is that the extent of what it means to love our neighbors in the age of COVID-19? Might the call to a Maundy Thursday depth of love ask a bit more of us?
An iTeam doctor supports patients in Haiti. Screenshot via Youtube / RNS
Judith Mesadieu has dreams of becoming a doctor, but her poor eyesight and partial blindness makes it hard to study.
A corneal transplant could fix the problem, but the procedure remains rare in Haiti, which has just six eye surgeons for every 1 million people, according to the International Council of Ophthalmology.
Fortunately, Mesadieu snagged a spot on the recent surgery docket of a U.S.-based eye surgery missions group called the iTeam.
The iTeam, based out of Kansas City, Mo., has been traveling to Saint Louis du Nord for about 16 years. They preform eye surgeries twice a year alongside local ophthalmologists, teaching them new skills and improvements.
Lydia Allen, 66, is a nonmedical staff member of iTeam and said the Bible calls on her to continue to go these trips and help in any way possible.
“Go ye therefore into all the world,” Allen said, quoting Jesus’ Great Commission.
Foot-washing ceremony. Photo courtesy Jarrod McKenna
Oh, Sarah Palin.
So you’ve most likely heard Sarah Palin used baptism as a metaphor for waterboarding terrorists. (I mean I heard and I’m in Australia!) I found out when fellow neo-Anabaptist Tyler Tully sent me his reflections. Many are blogging thoughtful responses. But more and more this is my conviction: the best critique of the bad is the practice of the beautiful. So I want to testify to the beauty of the baptisms I was a part of on Sunday.
I do so knowing that the despondence and darkness I feel when baptism is equated with the diabolical is driven out in the joy of the mystery of what happen when we say yes to the Holy Spirit by wading in the water. Our new sister Natha, brother Ky, and I met separately in the End Poverty movement. Both of them, in quiet different ways, found themselves being found by God while looking for a better world. And in Jesus they found the world they were looking for has started! Without a dry eye in the community that surrounded them on Sunday, they shared their wanderings in the wilderness before following Jesus through the waters.
Pope Francis waves from the pope-mobile during his inauguration Mass. RNS photo by Andrea Sabbadini
Pope Francis on Thursday washed the feet of 12 young inmates, including two girls and two Muslims, during a Maundy Thursday Mass at a youth detention center in Rome.
The Argentine pontiff, who has shown an eagerness to break with tradition in the two weeks since his election to the papacy on March 13, chose to celebrate the rite in the Casal del Marmo prison in northwest Rome, rather than in the traditional venue of the St. John Lateran Basilica.
Francis has repeatedly stated his desire to bring the papacy and the church closer to the poor and the marginalized.