(For almost exactly a year now--since my personal consecration Sunday--the act of spilling things has had a sacramental quality...finally it makes sense.)

A Prayer for Intimacy
If I am to get lost at all,
let it be in Your arms.
Help me to love You the way Mary did.
And may something of the spilling passion of her devotion,
spill onto me.

This was a Ken Gire prayer requesting intimacy that I quoted back in early June. It took me until this week to realize I'd dreamed this prayer before it ever found these words in my life. Revelation knowledge is a funny thing: you go for months with a strange and beautiful or incongruous image locked in your imagination, and you wonder what it means. Then when the time comes for understanding, you suddenly see its form under a bright spotlight, and your first thought is, "But this is so simple, a child could have seen it. So how did I not see it sooner?"

Foot-washing. I needed at least four references to pop up around me this week for me to be lead into that spotlight, because I hadn't given intimate thought to foot-washing for a long time. Not really since this:

Some years ago, when we were given charge of a youth group, we ended our tenure with them through a surprise foot-washing...do you remember, my love? Pastor Doane gave us that beautiful porcelain bowl and pitcher to use, then helped us by offering them Communion before they came to see us. I remember how incredibly intimate it felt, standing there ourselves also barefoot in that warm darkened room. The candlelight and the water and the soft towels and the music almost feeling as intensely personal as the trinkets that accompany a child's birth. And I remember those we served, first seeing their surprise, then the tears that stung their eyes--both the kids and their parents--as we said goodbye this way. That was a long time ago, when we lived on a lake named for Egypt, as we lived in a place called little Egypt--named thusly because it fed corn to other parts of the Mid-west during a drought long ago...living there as though we'd been planted in a place where Biblical Egypt would be remembered...along with Joseph's forgotten lineage.

Now this spring, on Palm Sunday, you had a dream in which you heard the One who loves us best say to you that His essence would be in the intimacy established between us and those He would lead you to meet...those destined to help us raise our sacrifice, our gift. My prayer is that the intimacy He described to you will feel like the intimacy of that foot-washing. But I also know how it will be different, for my Bible-reading this morning put me at Saint John's version of the foot-washing event. Christ's words to Peter were..."What I am doing you do not understand now, but you will after this." Peter did not want Jesus to wash his feet; he did not want to accept that his own dirty feet would cause Jesus to enter such degradation as to act like a slave given a filthy task. I can relate to that wish for my own cleanness to be such that Jesus wouldn't really need to suffer so much shame on account of me. Peter realized the depth of his connection with all that springs from Adam when the cock crowed on the witching hour...but by then he had already received the foot-washing and everything it represented. And so, I expect, shall we be on both sides of this intimate act of service, one that hardly bears its early ignomy, which is a loss. So is this the flavor of the presentation of our gift? I came across this verse yesterday, too. It also struck a chord with me on a personal level.

"In that day a present will be brought to the Lord of hosts from a people tall and smooth of skin [polished or scrubbed], and from a people terrible [awe-inspiring or mighty] from their beginning onward, a nation powerful and treading down, whose land the rivers divide--to the place of the name of the Lord of hosts, to Mount Zion." Isaiah 18:7


So...I finally have words for that dream from last winter, the dream that echoed Gire's prayer for intimacy and my own sense of making a sacrificial gift-offering. It was a simple dream: I was lying on the ground while a woman knelt over me, face down with her long golden hair flung above her. She'd positioned herself so that she could drag that hair down my body. The nape of her neck was delicate and feminine, and the hair ran up from that neck, each lock one of a thousand golden brooks of water, tiny currents rolling down me as she moved over me from my head to my toes. With the touch of that hair came that all-over good feeling that we both know is not of this world, and never comes except in these dreams. But in this dream, that "good" was not so bold as it is when He brings it, rather it was just a hint...indeed like a fine perfume that makes you ask yourself, "Did I just catch a whiff of something wonderful?" But you're not sure, because it disappears only a moment after it arrives. So I see now this dream is yet another after affect of a significant foot-washing.

Jhn 12:3 Then took Mary a pound of ointment of spikenard, very costly, and anointed the feet of Jesus, and wiped his feet with her hair: and the house was filled with the odour of the ointment.

It took me until this last week to see the dream's significance. Now as I bring my own gift to the Lord of Hosts I see how I am connected with Mary of Bethany, the Mary who spilled costly perfume on Jesus' feet and wiped them with her hair. That hair carried in it the scent of the costly perfume mingled with the dust from His feet. How often did she hold it to her face and inhale the magic trapped there? Did she grieve when the day came that she had to wash it? He told her that this act commemorating His sacrifice would endure. No wonder Paul said,
1Cr 11:7
For a man indeed ought not to cover [his] head, forasmuch as he is the image and glory of God: but the woman is the glory of the man.

For a long time I had trouble with the verses that said a woman should cover her head if her hair would be long, or else cut the hair if she would not cover it. It seemed to me an instructional thing that somehow demeaned women in a way. Now any bitterness drops off like an avalanche as I see it is a beautiful prophetic thing that springs from this moment of anointing, indeed that the woman's hair carried a precious secret in it, one for her to protect until the proper time, and so fulfill the original role of Eve...only in this case the Eve that would be fit to serve Christ. I feel like the dream I had revealed the secret power in a woman's hair when employed in foot-washing. It feels like He sent her to me to place upon me that part of His essence bequeathed to me through her as I walk into the last days before I too offer some kind of sacrifice, and this a mystery and a secret...a transfer of power to glorify the Man.

If there be an underlying theme, it would be to define the nature of those who would walk after His ministry: for these are people who believe (and practice their belief) that doing the one thing which seems most demeaning carries with it a hidden glory given to both the one serving and the one being served.