Footwashing
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Musings | June 23, 2026
I gaze into the sky on a starry night, contemplating its vastness, imagining the wonders that must exist on the inconceivable number of planets whirling around the unutterable number of stars gyring around staggering numbers of galaxies. And yet I cannot imagine anything in this stupendous universe that comes close to the glory that is love.
After nearly fourteen billion years since the Big Bang, somehow, on one little planet in an obscure solar system in a nondescript galaxy, love emerged. It is the result of the unfolding of the cosmos. It is the consequence of the evolution of life on earth. First, love of family – of parents for children, of children for parents. Then love for tribe and community. And then, the supreme love– the unconditional love of human beings for all other humans - even enemies - and for all living beings, and for the planet itself, extending out to the universe. Love that is utterly other-oriented. The love expressed in the sacred myth of Jesus - a man willing to die for love of perfect strangers. A man who invoked forgiveness toward the people who killed him. We’ve been touched by it – we’ve received it – we’ve shared it. When Renee Good and Alex Pretti laid down their lives in Minneapolis defending undocumented people – people they didn’t even know personally, facing senseless and inhumane deportation - we were left standing in awe. When the Freedom Riders, both Black and white, rode into the belly of the segregation beast in the South in the 1960’s, and were beaten within inches of their lives for love of all Black people suffering from suffocating oppression, we were left standing in awe. When we are treated with compassion by people who owe us nothing and have nothing to gain in return, we are left standing in awe that such love could and does exist.
I believe that the great task of Christianity today is to re-enchant humankind with reverent awe for selfless love. “…God is love.” So wrote the author of the first letter of John near the end of the New Testament. Love is God, the Ultimate Reality, the most important thing in the universe, most worthy of our worship, the most worthy goal of our lives. If we are in holy amazement before selfless love, if we love love itself with our whole hearts, it is the compass directing our every thought and wish and deed. I interpret the whole Christian religion through the lens of this line from the scripture: “…God is love.” Whatever in our faith tradition affirms this unconditional love, I embrace. Whatever does not, I set aside as parts of our history but not as essential to its practice.
I assume that God is no more and no less than love. Love is super and love is natural, but it doesn’t need to be “supernatural” to be divine. When we love others unconditionally, we are one with God. When we gaze into the stars with open, curious, awe-struck hearts, we are extending divine love into the farthest reaches of the universe. Love is the supreme emergent property of the unfolding cosmos. If our precious little planet is the only place in the universe where love has blossomed from the processes of nature, it is enough to prove that the unfolding of the universe has the potential, if not a propensity, to generate love. This love is how the universe comes into deep appreciative consciousness of itself. The love we share with each other, the love we feel when we gaze at the starry sky, is the universe waking up to itself - coming to attentive, joyful awareness of all that is within it.
The Big Bang and the fourteen billion years that followed was the pregnancy of the universe. The emergence of unconditional love among human beings, and likely among beings on other planets, is the birth of the universe as a sentient entity. When we love, we are fulfilling the destiny of the whole cosmos!
The term “God” is a poetic expression of encounter with the highest level of love. It is a word with a lot of baggage, problematic for very many reasons. But it is precious nonetheless, because it denotes the perennial yearning of humankind for communion with the ultimate, underlying reality of the universe. Love is personal. We are moved to talk about love as if it were a divine person. For us to “worship God” is a way of saying that we “love love itself”.
Love is intentional, focused, non-judgmental attention to others. It is an invisible quality of consciousness that results in visible, life-affirming actions.
“Instructions for living a life: / Pay attention. / Be astonished. / Tell about it.” So wrote the poet, Mary Oliver. She also wrote that “Attention is the beginning of devotion.” “Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer. It presupposes faith and love. Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer,” wrote the philosopher and theologian, Simone Weil.
I am a very lucky grandpa who gets to spend time every week with my grandsons, 5 and 6 years old. I pay attention to them. I watch what they do, I listen to what they say, purposefully. I get down on the floor and observe them and join in their play, on their terms. They know that I am paying full attention to them, going with their flow, not just mine. My attentive consciousness towards my grandsons naturally results in engaged action. My invisible attention has visible consequences. I do tell my grandsons that I love them, but I hardly need to speak those words. They already know I love them, because of the quality of our connection. I learned to give this love to my grandsons from my dad, who showered this attention on me when I was a child. He got down on the floor with me and my siblings and played with us the way we played with each other. At bedtime, he’d crack open the door of our bedrooms and just stand there and worship us for a moment in silence – a worship that we could feel, a worship that got into our own hearts and stayed with us for the rest of our lives.
Love = attention = prayer = God.
This understanding of God clears away a great many problematic aspects of religion. All attempts to prove the existence of God as a supernatural entity, a deity that intervenes in the world from beyond it, have failed, for lack of evidence and ultimately for lack of relevance. Morality clearly does not depend on believing in such a God. Science and technology carry on just fine without an answer to the question of the existence of such a God. All the so-called proofs of God’s existence are circular – their conclusions depend on the initial assumption that there must be a supernatural God. Those who recognize the impossibility of proving such a God’s existence, but are convinced that such a God must exist anyway, take the “leap of faith” in order to maintain their belief. But one must ask why this belief is essential in the first place. The existence or nonexistence of a supernatural God is inconsequential for understanding how the world works and for choosing how to conduct our lives.
But God as all-embracing love is supremely consequential. What’s not to believe about it? We know it, we feel it, we experience it, we see how it affects us and the world around us. At its purest, love delivers us into worshipful reverence. “Attention only reaches its true dimensions when it is religious,” wrote Simone Weil. Love is all the religion that we will ever need. The love who is God is plenty divine. The mission of Christianity is to cultivate this unconditional love in our hearts, and from our hearts into our deeds.
The great mystics of the church cultivated love through contemplative prayer. Over years of daily practice, they paid extremely intense attention to their inner lives. Their goal in prayer was not to petition a supernatural God for things they wanted, but rather to enter into union with the divine. They watched their thoughts and urges and sensations and inner narratives, until they came to the awareness that the one doing the watching was not the same as what was being watched. The inner observer was not their bodies, not their minds, not their personalities – all of which were being observed. The inner observer was divine love itself. “The eye with which I see God is the eye with which God sees me,” preached Meister Eckhart, the 14th century German mystic. And the spiritual practice of the mystics resulted in compassionate action. In the fourth and fifth centuries, monks went out into the desert to practice solitary contemplation. They spent most of their time alone, but interacted regularly with people in nearby towns. A collection of their sayings and stories, “The Wisdom of the Desert Fathers”, includes this passage: “One of the monks, called Serapion, sold his book of the Gospels and gave the money to those who were hungry, saying: I have sold the book which told me to sell all that I had and give to the poor.” The early Christian monastic mystics practiced the attention that is love, until they came into communion with divine love itself. And this consciousness led them to memorable acts of kindness.
Our small-“s” selves are our personalities, bodies, stories, and roles in the world. Our true capital-“S” selves are the attentive consciousness at the cores of our being. As St Paul wrote, “…it is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me.” Love = attention = prayer = God = Christ.
When we love, love is who we are.
They didn’t really know each other, except as familiar faces from the streets. She was a young woman, unhoused, struggling with an alcohol addiction but managing to keep herself mostly neat and clean and usually employed, if only through a temporary agency. He was a Vietnam veteran whose alcoholism drove him literally into the gutter. He lived in the creek bed in the park not far from the Urban Ministry’s drop-in center. Every day he would gather enough empty cans out of trash bins to trade in for money to buy a case of cans full of beer. He wore filthy clothes, had bad teeth, and had a finger deformed by jungle rot.
On this morning, he came to our open-air drop-in center in a parking lot to sober up with a cup of free coffee. She came to get a free bus pass and a referral for a shower at the local gym, to get a bite of breakfast, and to use our phone to call her temp agency.
Suddenly the veteran fell to the ground in an alcoholic seizure. His eyes rolled back, his body stiffened, and his teeth clamped down on his tongue. The young woman immediately rushed to his side, got a cloth to push between his teeth, and as he heaved and twisted, she calmly tended him. She put his head in her lap, held his hand, and stroked his head until the seizure passed.
In my days as the executive director of the Urban Ministry, I was a witness to many acts of compassion shown among people living on the streets. But never had I seen anything as beautiful as this.
The Pietà, that Renaissance marble statue of Mary mournfully holding her dead son Jesus in her lap, came to mind as I witnessed this act of mercy on the asphalt at our outdoor drop-in center. Two souls were brought together randomly in an intimate moment. The young woman’s own wounds opened her heart to the veteran’s suffering.
In that moment, her way was the Way of Jesus. Loving for the sake of loving. Loving without an agenda. I saw God on that asphalt parking lot that morning… and what I witnessed was the best thing in the entire universe.
The Rev. Jim Burklo is pastor of the United Church of Christ in Simi Valley, Calif. This post is republished with his Substack blog.