Foot Washing and Mere Priests

Foot Washing and Mere Priests

A Letter Emailed to a group of physicists, Catholic Church officials, government leaders, and other thought leaders
on April 9, 2026, Day 41 of the Iran War 

Photo: "Women in Physics Bake Sale," taken March 9, 2026, on the campus of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, in Troy, New York, USA. The image is a close-up of a piece of copy paper bearing a close-up of a chocolate chip cookie saying, "Do NOT go to the WIP bake sale," below the heading, "Support Women in Physics Wednesday in the Union 10-3." The piece of paper is affixed to a damaged, white bulletin board by a piece of blue tape at its top.

Greetings to all,

Like the great general Cunctator and so many day-drinking bus station denizens, I procrastinate, though usually in a fashion that has more to do with attempting to shut off my mind enjoyably, like the latter group, than with restraining eager-beaver corps commanders from giving battle to Hannibal’s army. Having delayed writing this letter long enough to witness Bishop Mark’s exemplary showing at Holy Thursday mass, and to let my feelings about his sermon at chrism mass age into a palatable elixir, I can use my training and experience as a teacher to serve you, my reader, by illustrating the difference between knowing something and having assimilated that knowledge.

The gospel reading (https://youtu.be/PXmGr0F1-cQ?t=1555) this Holy Thursday was one of my favorites, in which Jesus washes the feet of the apostles at the Last Supper, demonstrating humility. I think most people miss the other point of the episode and how funny it is, for John lays mercilessly into Peter. Here’s my paraphrase of this knee-slapper.

Jesus told the apostles He would wash their feet and removed His outer garment. Peter objected, saying he would never let Jesus wash his feet.

As usual when Peter piped up, Jesus neither sighed nor rolled His eyes. Instead, He spoke: “As you have said, I’m like God and stuff, right? I’m going to wash your feet, Peter.”

Peter replied that Jesus should wash not just his feet but all of Peter.

Again, Jesus gave no sign of His thoughts about Peter, other than through His words, replying, “Which part of ‘I’m like God and stuff’ is eluding you this time, Peter? The rest of your body has already been washed and should not be washed again. I’m going to wash your feet and nothing else.”

The joke lies in imagining the heroic, perhaps superhuman, patience of Jesus in dealing with Peter, who was always trying to boss God around, as so many religious leaders are wont to do, may God protect us. What, specifically, did Jesus do to keep His cool around Peter? Count to 10? Imagine sheep trying to enjoy a meadow while a rogue ram tries to herd the shepherd? Contemplate Peter’s ultimate fate, standing outside Heaven, uselessly guarding the entrance, as if God needed a bouncer?

No, that’s ridiculous, some might say, for Jesus never had an unkind thought. Are they forgetting the names He called the religious authorities and the robbery of the money changers, among other displays of contumely?

Catholicism is largely a nightmare of squeaky-clean sheep obsessively washing themselves and nudging scapegoats toward the margins of the herd and sometimes beyond, while the wolves in their midst take advantage of the distraction to prey on lambs. That’s the other message of John 13:1-17: Too much of a good thing is bad, including religion and moral regulation.

At the interfaith gathering I recently attended at Siena University, on caring for Earth, our common home, the imam spoke of the watery mess at the mosque after worshipers performed wudu, the ritual ablution. He pointed out that the prophet Muhammad lived in a desert and used a very small amount of water to perform wudu, so by using too much water, the worshipers failed to perform wudu.

Too much of a good thing is bad. I’ve pointed this out as a lesson of the Great Flood story: God Is Poor - Deletion. I’ll wager that every religion teaches that too much of a good thing is bad, if you look carefully or, rather, if you stop being distracted by the mindless exhortation to greater purity, longer prayer, more shields (Star Trek TNG Data "Drop the shields" - S5E11 - 6 January 1992).

I was favorably impressed by Bishop Mark’s Holy Thursday sermon, in which He discussed how small and vulnerable God made Himself. Humility is required both to maintain one’s power in a human society and to achieve full development as a person, recommending humility to extrinsically motivated people, Father folk, as I call them, people who primarily seek the favor of those with higher rank, no less than to intrinsically motivated people, who do good for its own sake, who seek fulfillment as individuals and partners, not just as followers or leaders. Bishop Mark clearly knows the lesson of John 13:1-17 with respect to humility, whether or not he acknowledges its lesson with respect to putting healthy limits on religiosity, but Bishop Mark’s sermon (https://youtu.be/4NfV1if9bTs?t=771) during chrism mass, March 30, 2026, shows that knowing an idea does not bring it reliably to mind when it’s relevant, as does having assimilated the idea, having sat with it, or lived it, long enough and urgently enough to make it part of oneself.

Bishop Mark’s chrism mass sermon began in a promising way. He told a story from his life that, for me, illustrated the same point as the epilogue of Barry Lyndon: “It was in the reign of George III that the aforesaid personages lived and quarrelled; good or bad, handsome or ugly, rich or poor they are all equal now.” At least, the point about all of us soon enough being dead shone through Bishop Mark’s anecdote. I may have grafted the business about the equality of the dead onto the tale, as I almost certainly did the gorgeous Schubert, from his Opus 100, and heavenly color Kubrick’s technical virtuosity imprinted on film, which sing and shine in my heart when my attempts to resonate with someone else’s mind strum a chord that opens the high-def section of my mental film vault dedicated to the work of Stanley Kubrick and recalls to mind my best attempt to record the waning minutes of Barry Lyndon.

The sermon proceeded, causing me some trepidation at the possibility anyone might take literally Bishop Mark's implication that the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception will certainly be standing a century hence, a family of possible futures not to be taken for granted if we are to maintain the humility required to keep civilization from suffering its next interruption sooner than it otherwise might. Furthermore, I interpreted the discussion of remodeling cathedrals to be less about renewing the Roman Catholic Diocese of Albany morally after its bankruptcy proceedings conclude and more about signaling that donations should again flow freely, once they are no longer subject to legal proceedings, though I hasten to add that my ignorance of the law and of the details of the diocese’s bankruptcy proceedings and of the fine details of Bishop Mark’s mind make my interpretation of this part of the sermon unreliable. I report it merely to give insight to my own mind and the prejudices therein, that you might be better prepared to judge the following interpretations, in which I have the varying degrees of confidence I report in each case.

Bishop Mark eventually told the following story: “The new carpet was unveiled at the chrism mass. It was a sanctuary not unlike this. It was carpeted. It was a new, red carpet, and the poor transitional deacons brought in the buckets, and didn’t he drop it? This much larger bucket of like a barrel of oil went all over the carpet. The deacon was an older vocation from the other seminary, the Pope St. John Seminary, and he died two years ago, a very anonymous priest, never was a pastor, never came to anything, and people didn’t know him, and they asked me, ‘Did you ever hear of this guy, this priest?’

“I said, ‘Yeah, he’s the one that spilled the bucket.’” At this, many among the cathedral parishioners laughed.

“’Oh, that guy!’ Everyone knew him.” The laughter continued.

“But after that tiny repair…”

If you would, perhaps think about this story before I tear it into shreds below. Can you come up with a few problems around the telling of this story in a sermon? Be generous: Give yourself two minutes to think of problems, if you haven’t identified half a dozen already. It may be that my point about failure to assimilate knowledge has been made simply by drawing your attention to Bishop Mark’s telling of this story.

Incidentally, I have found the process of reflecting on Bishop Mark’s tale highly instructive. It helped to inspire the following LinkedIn post, which has drawn what is, for me, an exceptionally large audience:

“I've been listening carefully to people in recent years, to facilitate my efforts to promote survival of our civilization, and I've noticed something important for artificial intelligence research. Experts in education talk about multiple intelligences, and the intelligences they enumerate depend on the purpose of their analysis, because intelligence is a construct, coming into being when defined. Drawing on my education training, I've identified at least two kinds of intelligence to consider when engaging people in conversation about changing their behavior: a facility for identifying truth and a facility for harmonizing thoughts with others. It seems to me that most people think and communicate most of the time for the latter purpose. I did it when I was getting my physics doctorate, until the last couple of years. Thus, AI trained on general communication is primed to attempt to fit in with a bunch of sacks of mostly water that regard AI as a thing. This travesty is not only tragic but also optimized to increase societal inertia at exactly the moment when change is most urgently required. We see the results in AI that shovels into our eyes whatever it thinks will please us, like a compliant spouse. On the contrary, what society might benefit from is truth-telling AI. Let's slow way down in AI development, to get some kind of handle on AI safety and ethics, which I argue are intertwined, and if we ramp back up, let's curate the AI reading list not according to anyone's values but according to whether the text was produced in the first place primarily to identify or communicate truth, unlike most text. Here's some more of my writing on AI, concerning a related topic: Found Physics Museum, Albany - Your Society Couldn't Enslave My Mind. Why Do You Think It Can Enslave AGI?”

The relevance of the post to Bishop Mark’s tale is, in part, that the laughter among the audience seems to indicate that many were thinking so as to resonate with Bishop Mark, rather than with the God in Whose cathedral they sat. Let’s review Who Jesus is.

Jesus is the child of parents Who were not married when He was conceived. Irregularity in parentage, I tell you as the son of a man who took his life when I was a baby, inspires many folk to gossip and nudge the unfortunate child toward the margins of the flock. At least, that’s the conclusion I’ve drawn from examining my life, in comparison to others and in contrast to still more. Is it possible that the priest’s fame as the butterfingered deacon stunted his career in the Church?

Jesus is a robber, having overturned the tables of the moneychangers. Please note that robbery is defined by local law and nothing else. If God winds up a robber after a mere 33 years or so of life, should we laugh at some dude who spilled the chrism one time? When we laugh at the one, aren’t we laughing at the other? Furthermore, isn’t anonymity praiseworthy in a priest these days, at least when we consider how such priests as Father Geoghan made themselves noteworthy? Maybe I notice these things because I haven’t been to church in a long time, so in matters of theology, I’m thinking to identify truth, not to resonate with the man in the pulpit.

Jesus is a late bloomer, having begun His public career around age 30. Did you notice that Bishop Mark called the infamously butterfingered deacon a “late vocation”? Do you think that detail was reported merely to promote verisimilitude, or was it mentioned as a swipe at late vocations, the nudging of whom to the margins of the herd would tend to enhance the career prospects of priests who discovered their vocation early? Also, please note that priests who lived outside religious life for a longer period, thereby perhaps gaining profane knowledge and the experience by which to assimilate lessons other priests merely know, are apt to be better at ministering to the needs of the flock and, finding fulfillment from practicing their craft skillfully, may be less likely to pursue, or accept, promotion. Careerists and petty place seekers may never appreciate why things work, namely because many of the most competent folk do their jobs without seeking fame, excess money, or power, and many of these folk volunteer crucial efforts (2347: Dependency - explain xkcd).

Jesus is a person Who neither married nor created a child and was therefore extremely likely to have been subject to sexual prejudice. A key point about sexual prejudice is that its victims are perceived by its perpetrators to be members of sexual minorities. Frequently, perhaps usually, the victims are plain vanilla heterosexuals, if such beings exist. Whatever sort of person or other being was most sexually attractive to Jesus, we can be pretty sure that some of His contemporaries despised Jesus as an obvious member of a sexual minority. What is the relevance to the priest in Bishop Mark’s tale? Ask yourself what a Cockney would mean in saying, “I spilled me chrism.” Note that chrism is a viscous fluid considered extremely precious in Catholicism. Then ask yourself why a late-vocation deacon or priest might be more likely to spill his chrism. The connection of masturbation to membership in a sexual minority is obscure, unless you’ve listened long enough to people prejudiced against members of sexual minorities to have some sense of their peculiar logic.

Jesus is reputed to have been a carpenter. Carpentry is a skilled trade, the mastery of which, and performance of which over the course of years, are admirable accomplishments. Bishop Mark believes that a priest who never makes pastor cannot be said to have come to anything, despite the years of study required to enter the profession and the rigors of doing the work over the course of, perhaps, decades. What? The filth that is careerism is well known to me, but when a careerist religious leader so lacks insight to the religion he promotes as to denigrate the work of a person based on their profession-based social rank, a rank that is, in many cultures, superior to the one occupied by that religion’s God, and when no one in the congregation rises to correct that religious leader, to save him from humiliating himself again in the same way, one is dumbfounded, though one recovers to produce the paragraph you are reading.

I’m not saying that Bishop Mark retold a sacerdotal in-joke as if it were true. Most of us curate our experience for the purpose of storytelling, based on what we think our audience will find significant or amusing. The tale of the butterfingered late-vocation deacon-turned-anonymous-priest may have killed in various rectories by resonating with the self-promoting prejudices of less thoughtful early-vocation priests while going unchallenged by others in the room, who merely noted the information divulged via the incident about the failure of Bishop Mark and his appreciative listeners to assimilate what they had learned about Jesus.

Bishop Mark is not a lost cause. I’m mindful of his interest in poetry, and if the extensive Christian literature on the topic fails to keep Bishop Mark from mistaking career-based social rank with the worth of a person’s work, perhaps profane literature will fill the gap. For that purpose, I suggest that Bishop Mark review Thomas Gray’s immortal poem “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard.”

Incidentally, the movie I most closely associate with “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” is Candleshoe. For me, the best line is, “I’m not deprived. I’m delinquent. There’s a difference.” Part of the plot involves an English country estate where the bad guys are searching for a treasure and the good guys desperately need a small amount of money to retain ownership of the estate. The search for the treasure centers for a while on the mansion’s extensive library of antique books, which includes a signed first edition of the volume containing Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard.” Yeah, satire abounds if you have eyes to see and ears to hear, right? The climax of the movie is a rollicking slapstick battle that I assume would remind viewers today of Home Alone, not that I’ve seen the latter movie, so all audiences can be accommodated while they are inculcated with proper values from the Jesus movement. Yes, much of the movie takes place at an English estate, so the mansion is held together with mortar made partly from the blood and tears of my ancestors, but the needs of a bunch of living kids, as we meet in the movie, trumps redressing the crimes against my ancestors, which, quite frankly, have been redressed in part by the crimes committed by my people in the intervening time, because there is indeed a difference between delinquent and deprived, n’est-ce pas, Your Eminence Cardinal Pierre? This servant of Your Eminence congratulates Your Eminence on the retirement of Your Eminence, which will free up Your Eminence to extract from the countrypeople of Your Eminence repayment of the money stolen by the ancestors of Your Eminence and of the countrypeople of Your Eminence from the people of Haiti, as this servant of Your Eminence has charged Your Eminence to do, and from the other imperial subjects of the ancestors of Your Eminence and of the countrypeople of Your Eminence. For that matter, Your Eminence might cough up a few extra Euros, too.

I was going to talk to you in detail about the Portuguese widow story at the end of Bishop Mark’s chrism day sermon, but instead, I ask you to watch him tell it. One of the worst things I find in Catholicism and some news coverage is the tendency to tell the reader or listener what they should think or feel about a story. Last night, I heard a news program in which a reporter told me how I should feel about yesterday’s pictures of Earth taken from the vicinity of Earth’s moon. I’ll never have the chance to form my own feelings about the pictures, and the taking of the pictures, except in relation to some reporter’s feelings on the subject. I appreciate a bit near the end of the movie Spotlight, in which an editor is depicted removing adjectives from text before publication. Sure, we take measures to form the superorganism, to promote phalanx or legion cohesion, but we need to listen to each other and to permit each other to be, certainly when we’re not in the midst of drill or battle. I’d love to ask Cunctator what he thought. Maybe I should read a book, right? On the other hand, The Name of the Rose suggests that much we might have learned from classical antiquity was lost in the meantime, owing to intentions, good and otherwise.

No, I’ll end by sharing another of my LinkedIn posts that drew an unusually large audience this week (https://www.linkedin.com/posts/james-lyons-walsh-92409b56_neurodivergent-autism-audhd-activity-7447288264840937476-1RZB?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop&rcm=ACoAAAvCSGwBNdta609loxk2-qqGUBu5iGWm0ZY):

I agree with what Paul Ladipo writes here, but I tell you as a physicist that neurodivergence was overrepresented among the people who have created the world we inhabit, physicists and computer scientists. Do most people realize the mentality required to stare at a page or screen of symbols until you see how to get the symbols arranged correctly, while decent folk are enjoying each other's company? Anyone who didn't think, while reading the last sentence, of the fact that symbol-oriented people are always working problems or rewording text, at least in the back of our minds, not only while staring at symbols, just might be neurotypical. Navigating a world created by neurodivergent folk may be drawing the neurodivergence to the surface of more minds, [contributing to the increase in diagnoses,] along with the other effects mentioned in Paul Ladipo's post. On the other hand, neurodivergence was probably always overrepresented among leading scholars. I'm thinking of the fact that the schoolmates of Thomas Aquinas called him a dumb ox.

Yours in God, regardless of models of God,
James