Vocations Blog

Community Mandatum: Lord, are you going to wash my feet?

01 April 2010

WHEN I WAS A NOVICE the Community Mandatum was my all-time favourite ritual of the whole liturgical year.  It takes place in Glencairn on the eve of Passion Sunday, setting the tone for the days to come.  Mandatum means “commandment” and derives from John 13:34: “I give you a new commandment, love one another as I have loved you”.  Having our community foot-washing rite on the cusp of Holy week places Gospel teaching on love and service at the forefront of the great events commemorated around the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ and of course, in our relationships to one another.

Like life itself, it is the little actions that strike me as significant on this evening: the freshly-ironed linen and folded towels waiting on tables out on the Cloister… a glimpse as I pass of the Abbess tying her apron around her waist and rolling up her sleeves…the community assembling in their cowls in the Chapter room where each one had first started out on her monastic journey. The restful chant and hymns the sisters sing to accompany the Abbess and Prioress as they minister to each one.  The whole event never fails to bring tears – its message is important to me.

Perhaps as a Novice at my first Community Mandatum I was thinking of the line that had struck me, before I entered, reading the Cistercian Constitutions.  I can remember sharing them with a friend: “As a skilled physician, the Abbess seeks to cure both her own wounds and those of others, and to bring healing to those hurt by sin.”  Maybe I intuited that my life in community would help me to “return to my heart” as the Cistercian fathers and mothers say, with all its light and shadow, pain and joy, challenge and growth.

Getting tactile with each other in a ritual such as this is at once humbling and ennobling.  We open ourselves to receive from the other, to be served and cared for by our neighbour, and to pour ourselves out in our service to them in turn.  This is the Gospel teaching on the realisation of true selfhood; our vow of conversion that turns us towards God and the other, leading us to spiritual communion and intimacy.

As I follow the procession out of the Chapter room to Compline at the end of the ceremony, I experience again that feeling of overwhelming gratitude, healing and real peace: we are in God’s hands, he pours himself out to us in self-giving love and draws us into authentic, life-giving relationship with one another.

When he had washed their feet and put on his outer garments again he went back to the table. “Do you understand”, he said, “what I have done to you?  You call me Master and Lord, and rightly; so I am. 
If I, then, the Lord and Master, have washed your feet, you must wash each other’s feet.  I have given you an example so that you may follow what I have done to you. (John 13:13-15)

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