Maundy Thursday
What a bowl of water and a rag teach us about God
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“Jesus cried aloud: … Whoever sees me sees him who sent me. … Then he poured water into a basin and began to wash the disciples’ feet and to wipe them with the towel that was tied around him.” —John 12:44-45; 13:5
MEDITATION
We’re being told by John, watch carefully and I’ll show you God. And then God washes the feet of His disciples.
—Terryl Givens, When Faith Is Hard
It wasn’t until God walked among us and washed the feet of his disciples that we knew the essence of God, that we understood what John meant when he said, “God is love.
—Terryl Givens, Peaceable Things: Three Names of Christ
ACTIVITY
Do a physical act of care for someone—paint their nails, brush their hair, rub lotion on their hands or feet—and allow them to do the same for you.
ESSAY
IN REMEMBRANCE Sunny Grames Stimmler
At the beginning of 2022, my husband and I lost two of our closest friends. We knew Jason and Becca when we were all living in Astoria, Queens, in the early 2000s—young newlyweds figuring out jobs and life in New York City. It was a fun and fascinating time. We were part of a large branch full of young, transplanted couples; Bolivians, Peruvians, Greeks, and Filipinos who had called Queens home for decades; and families whose teenage kids had never been to “the city” (Manhattan) just a short subway ride away. Our friendship with Becca and Jason grew around our service in the church. Every Wednesday night we got together with them and a few other friends to watch The West Wing as it aired, eating buffalo wings, and talking late into the night. Inevitably, conversation would turn to the people we served in the branch, gospel topics, and issues that both comforted and troubled us as members of the church. Those were formative, precious days—sacred even, as we forged our friendships, identities, and faith. The news of their deaths stunned me, darkening my life in a very real way.
They were killed in a car accident while traveling to a medical conference in Hawaii. In life, they were both changemakers: Becca had led her immigration law firm in offering free legal advice to refugees and migrants at the southern border. Jason changed the world in a quieter way, with a presence, smile, and laugh so comforting that just being near him felt like being hugged. Their deaths—tragic enough for the loss of the extraordinary people they were—felt all the more tragic because of the four children they left behind: siblings they had adopted only a few years previously. When I first heard the news, I immediately thought of the kids, and my heart hurt.
When their funeral came to an end—when all of us who knew them and loved them had said our goodbyes, shared our thoughts, expressed our disbelief, communicated our grief—when all the gathering was over and we went our separate ways, I felt a strong desire to create a way to continue commemorating Becca and Jason, a way to remember them. Not that I would ever fully forget them. I knew their memory would be real and reachable throughout my life—that at any moment I could think about them, remember our time together, recall their influence and impact on me and the world. But I also knew that from day to day, I wouldn’t think about them constantly, and eventually, not even frequently. I knew I would return to the routines of life and let go of the grief I felt at their sudden death. I knew I would pick up my life largely as if little had changed and move on from the sadness. And since they had not been a daily presence in my life for over fifteen years, I knew that this would happen quite quickly. I knew that in a very short time, I would forget.
So I felt the need to put in place a ritual—some sort of act that would take place in the same way and the same place and at the same time with regular frequency that would give me reason to pause from routine life and remember them. Something that would summon to my remembrance their personalities, their actions, their contributions, their influence. Something that would commemorate their lives and the loss of them. Something that would symbolize to me my love for them.
In the midst of this yearning, I realized that our weekly sacrament serves this very purpose—providing a regular time, place, and way to remember the Savior—and suddenly a new understanding of the sacrament seemed to open before my eyes. In recent years, a vague idea has flickered in and out of my mind: the sacrament has descended from a ritual first practiced by people who knew the Savior personally. As I listen to the priests pronounce the sacramental prayers every week, the injunction to “remember him” and to eat and drink “in remembrance” of him has caused me to wonder: What did this remembrance mean to those who walked with the Savior? What did commemorating his body and his blood feel like to those who had been touched and blessed and healed by him? Undoubtedly, it felt different for them than what I feel each Sunday. But these intimations of understanding never moved beyond small sparks of potential insight; I couldn’t quite imagine what it felt like. The reality of the disciples’ loss remained a mystery to me until I lost Becca and Jason. The grief I felt at their deaths—the yearning I experienced to remember and honor them over and over—became a gift, an insight allowing me a vision into the beginnings of this practice that marks our most common religious worship.
I imagine the Savior preparing his friends for his upcoming death and departure. He knew that, although they loved him and would grieve over losing him, eventually their grief and sorrow would diminish. Their minds would return to the mundane and worldly. Human nature would make them forget. They would need a way to remember. So he gave them the sacrament. He gave them an act that symbolized him—a practice that gave them emblems, physical reminders of his body and blood, tangible tokens of the way he died, with a broken body and spilled blood. He created a time and a place and a way for them to quietly take into themselves these remembrances. He initiated a routine that would give them a way to commemorate him, honor him, reverence him regularly.
I imagine the Savior’s disciples losing him—twice. The first time they lost him, they watched him die. They watched him suffer. The sky darkened. The earth raged enough that even the Roman soldiers cowered and wondered at what had just happened. The disciples saw the Savior’s body brutalized. This farewell flowed with blood, reeked of slaughter, and heaved with trauma. The one who was supposed to save them couldn’t—or wouldn’t—even save himself. But the second time they lost him, they watched as he was carried and received up to heaven. This farewell radiated with light, sang of hope, and resounded with rebirth. Before this farewell, they had watched—initially in terror and alarm—as he spoke to them, walked with them, cooked fish, and then ate with them. At first, they didn’t even recognize him, so overwhelming was the experience of seeing alive the friend they had just laid to rest. But then their confusion turned to joy and rejoicing as “he took bread, and blessed it, and brake, and gave to them” (Luke 24:30). The very ritual he created to ensure their remembrance of him kindled their recognition of his resurrected self.
Later, as they ate the bread and drank the wine that first time without Jesus, it must have been with a confusing mixture of anguish and awe. Simultaneously, the bread must have summoned images of the mutilated flesh that was his body, while also eliciting the comfort of seeing his body restored to wholeness. The wine must have awakened memories of blood flowing from and then clotting over his wounds, while also stirring up promises of rebirth and renewal. The act of sharing these sacramental symbols must have recreated the torture of seeing him submit to death, while equally embodying the hopeful miracle of resurrection, healing, and atonement.
I imagine them weeping as they pass the cup and the plate. I imagine the room solemn and still. The act is poignant and personal. They are remembering their friend. This larger-than-life person who swept them up in his miracles and preaching. This master teacher who transformed the way they believed, thought about, and understood everything in life. This person who meant everything to them.
I imagine them introducing the ritual to people who didn’t know Jesus. This represents his body. This represents his blood. He gave himself for us so that we can be healed. He was our friend and greater than anyone we’ve known. He taught us to love and live in a new way. He changed our hearts. He had the power of God with him, the power to heal any sickness, to raise the dead. And yet, he let himself be arrested, taken, tried, ridiculed, beaten, bruised, and killed. Then he lived again and spoke peace to us once more. We miss him terribly. Our lives are empty without him. So we remember him. We honor him. We memorialize him with this bread and wine. I imagine them shedding tears as they say this, choking up, needing to pause in their explanation as emotions engulf them and make speaking impossible.
Then eventually, they can perform the ritual without such overwhelming emotion. They feel sadness, but not such deep sorrow. They feel loss, but not such poignant grief. They long for the Savior’s presence, but they have made space in their hearts for the loss, blending it into the everyday without letting it go. Now, when they eat the bread and drink the wine, they do so solemnly and with reverence but without the desolation and despair that first marked the custom. They remember, they reflect, they recall.
I imagine them years later with their children, young people who weren’t even alive when Jesus was living. They tell stories. They describe his miracles. They tell his parables. They repeat his sermons. And they can do this with smiles on their faces as they remember his goodness and the happiness they felt in his presence. So now, when they participate in the sacrament, they can do so peacefully. Still reverently and quietly, but maybe the act is now touched with gratitude and comfort.
Now when I reach for the bread or cup of water each Sunday, I also reach for the longing to remember that has sprouted in my heart after losing my friends. I let that longing—and the imaginings it has inspired—touch my participation in the sacrament with new emotions. I try to collect those emotions on behalf of the Savior. This isn’t a fabrication. This isn’t a manufacturing of inauthentic feelings. This is a new understanding. I did not walk with Jesus during his life. I was not a disciple at his feet. I did not know him personally when he lived. But I yearn to feel for him the tangible, palpable love I feel for Jason and Becca. I want my feelings for him to mirror friendship. This evocation of the Savior’s friends sharing the bread and wine has transformed the mystery of the sacrament into something more personal, more profound, and more poignant. I am not just going through a motion or completing an impersonal act. I am commemorating a friend.
But in fact, when I return to this ritual every week, I am commemorating more than a friend. I am commemorating my Savior—the one whose death creates life rather than loss. Just like watching Jesus break, bless, and offer bread opened the eyes of the disciples to recognition of their resurrected Savior, so this quest to remember Becca and Jason has opened my eyes and heart to a new recognition of Christ and my love for him. The love I feel for my friends—the hunger I feel to keep their memory alive—is just a shadow of the love I feel for Christ and the reverence I feel for the atonement he suffered on my behalf. Now that love and reverence have been made concrete and tactile, infusing my weekly remembering with new holiness.
I have not created a way to remember Jason and Becca with some kind of ritual. I haven’t found something that feels right yet. The ideas that come to mind first feel too religious. In the end, I don’t want to venerate my friends as deities; I just want to spend time intentionally remembering them and feeling close to them. I might sit with some of Becca’s favorite literature—read a Mary Oliver poem once a month or reread Wallace Stegner’s Crossing to Safety once a year. I might dedicate a hike with my husband to their memory. I might go back to Astoria every few years and sit on the chapel steps to think about them. Whatever I come up with, my grief has given me a gift. Losing Becca and Jason has offered me something by brightening my understanding of my Savior’s sacrifice and the sacrament he gave us to remember it. As I have made this journey to both create a way to ritually remember my friends and understand the feelings of the early disciples, each pursuit has hallowed the other, making sacred the need to remember my friends and casting light on the mystery of the sacrament’s essence. The entwining of the two has become its own kind of sacrament in remembrance of my friends.
Sunny Grames Stimmler is an adjunct writing professor at American University, mother of two daughters, and a reluctantly aspiring polyglot thanks to twenty-five-plus years living overseas.
Art by Ron Richmond.
Beautiful, thank you.