Brother Ass: On the Holiness of Our Body

I was helping my 90-year old Dad shower the other day. We have developed a little ritual using St. Francis of Assisi’s affectionate name for his body, “Brother Ass.”

Dad sits on his tub-stool while the shower is running, and takes care of his basic cleaning. While he is still sitting, I scrub his back. I turn off the shower when I wash his feet, gently running the wash cloth between each of his toes, after which I rinse his feet from the tub faucet. Finally, I ask him to stand and present to me his backside, or “Brother Ass,” which I clean with a washcloth.

Of course, St. Francis called his entire body “Brother Ass,” and I suppose this is rather more proper. I don’t think St. Francis had a particular name for his rear-end. However, St. Francis was an earthy man who loved every bit of God’s creation. He knew the weaknesses of his body, and urged himself to saintliness through joyful bodily mortifications.

Nonetheless, I believe he would approve of our appropriation of his descriptive name for his entire body to Dad’s single (or double) body part. The term seems appropriate to me, and hopefully to you, gentle reader, in either usage.

Dad’s body and skin are in remarkable shape for a man his age. As I scrub his back, I find myself marveling at how strong and muscular he is.

His toes and feet are similar to my own 65 year-old-feet.

I have to admit I never liked my feet. I subjected them to grueling runs when jogging was my sport of choice. They ached when I had to walk long distances to bus stops after declining finances meant I could no longer afford a car. I like to think that if public transportation was good enough for Jorge Cardinal Bergoglio, now Pope Francis, it is good enough for me. I also find solace in St. Francis pushing his stigmatized feet (and hands and side, all part of Brother Ass) to the limit. Too often, I have also put “my foot in my mouth”.

I have had many foot and other ailments.

Interestingly, so has Dad. He was a factory worker who had horribly smelly feet after wearing heavy work shoes through a cruel 12 or 16 hour factory shift. We prayed that he would not remove his shoes in front of the TV when he got home. If he did, the room would clear in seconds and we would be outside even in the rain. He still has corns and bunions and pains in his toes and heels and flats of his feet.

But Dad’s greatest ambition in life is to get to heaven. He has a healthy disregard for his body, except that it functions towards his primary goal of preparing him to see God and to be with his entire family in heaven. That includes his wife of 67 years, his 7 children, 17 grandchildren and 6 great grandchildren. He wants all of us to be faithful Catholics or to be faithful believers.

This purity of intention and inner radiance of his are perhaps best reflected in certain of the ageless aspects of his body. His feet look like they could be getting younger.

If I were told when I was young that I would someday be washing Dad’s feet, I would have never believed it! St. Francis kissing the leper would have been far more attainable a model for me to adopt instead of washing Dad’s feet.

I believe that Dad’s eminently and beautifully washable feet and body, made in the image and likeness of God, is an icon of Christ, in His entire human and divine splendor. We are led to God through Jesus in the fullness of his Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity.

Our bodies are “mystical”. As St. Pope John Paul II taught us in his Theology of the Body, the deepest meaning of our body is its imprint in God’s image as Trinitarian, which means we are made for communion, and therefore, family. The greatest role model we can have in living a Trinitarian life of Communion and Discipleship is our Blessed Mother. She exemplified perfect family life as daughter of the Father, Mother of the Son, and Spouse of the Holy Spirit. She also was a perfect model for how we can live discipleship to the Trinity. Our Heavenly Mother intercedes for us to her Son to assist us in our familial and personal growth in holiness.

I’ll never forget hearing the late Founder of the Society of Our Lady of the Most Holy Trinity (SOLT), Father Jim Flanagan, talk about the one of the deepest desires God gave us as a Community. I was expecting something magical and mystical and not something eminently practical and real. I knew that the deepest desire I have is to see God face-to-face. I thought that was pretty mystical. But Fr. Jim said that what he heard most from the SOLT Community members was our desire to cooperate so deeply in God’s plan for us that every single member of our own personal family would want and desire to be with us in Heaven.

When he said this, in July 2013, I thought to myself: “No, that can’t be. Some of my relatives have lived lives so far from God’s grace that they will never make it to Heaven!”

And then it hit me. I was created to live a life of Trinitarian Communion so that I would be a vessel of God’s mystical inner life of mercy and joy and hope to bring those I love and serve to the fullness of eternal life. If I neglected any member of my family, as well as the others whom I loved, I would not be fulfilling the deepest calling and meaning of my life as designed in the image and likeness of God. I wanted and needed my wife, all of our children, and all of the other members of our families, both before and after us, to be together in heaven.

Now I more fully realize why the unique charism of SOLT for the world is that we live and work as a family, or a team, composed of all the members of the Church and family: priests, deacons, religious sisters and brothers, married and single and consecrated laity. This charism is deepened by the lived experience in our personal beings of having “graced friendships” with each other in Community and in our service to those poor and neglected members who are in greatest apostolic need from the Church (refugees, orphans, imprisioned, impoverished). This grace of friendship with each other and God’s anawim, or little ones, seems to me to flow from the “homoousios” Jesus had with the Father, or His being “consubstantial” with the Father (as we proclaim every Sunday in the Creed).

Serving Dad’s body and soul with love and joy and hope, helps him, and my entire family, I hope and pray, to want to live likewise.

God gave me a tremendous grace to come home to Wilmington, Delaware from Hawaii to honor my Mom and Dad. It has been part of God’s plan for me, I believe, from all eternity.

I can let God sculpt me in the image of Dad and my Heavenly Father. I’m not the leading man; Jesus is. Like St. Pope John Paul II explained in his “Law of the Gift”, I’m an embodied and unique person who was made to go beyond being a “brother ass” and giving myself as a complete gift to others!