Maundy comes from the Latin word mandatum, meaning commandment.
If I then, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another’s feet.
If I then, your Butcher and Separator of bodily spaces, cut your flesh, you also ought to relate to cleanliness. By cleaning I can become nameless, lose my fixed identity.
This flesh is cleansed through rite of foot-washing, which in various spiritual traditions is a form of purity through/as well as hospitality. A separator between the dirt that enters a space uninvited and the dirt that is accepted as common.
Flesh is in this case being translated as common, unclean, defiled, and unholy. flesh is always dirty and unclean in the eyes of the other.
Cleansing can be seen as an indicator of humility by way of low self-regard and a sense of unworthiness. In a religious context, humility can mean a recognition of self in relation to a deity or deities, and subsequently, submission to said deity or deities establishing one as a member of that religion.
The feeling of intrusion into a space could also relate to feeling liminal – feelings of tension and unease created by physical space and/or what happens within our bodies.
By creating an atmosphere wherein the ones that clean perceive themselves to be lower than the ones that are being cleaned, tensions are formed; the in-between as a constructed narrative. That which could be perceived as holy will now have space to reach beyond our control and is capable to become something else.
