Editor's Note: "Family Habit" by Rachel Sakashita was published in "Sacred Hearth," the first issue of Voice & Virtue Literary Magazine. The full piece can be read here.
“Family Habit” was at first, I believe, a semi-sonnet that I wrote for a class assignment in 2017, during my final year of college. At that point, I had been enthralled for several years by a singular image seared into my mind: the head of an international organization kneeling with a wash basin before one of her volunteers, swirling caked-on dust off the volunteer’s feet. It was the first time I had seen anyone wash someone else’s feet, particularly someone in a position of authority humbling herself to serve someone who ought to have been serving her, and the image stayed with me. In later years, whenever I read chapter thirteen in the Gospel of John, I thought again and again of what I had seen. I finally transposed the image into a poem.
My classmates didn’t seem to care much for the poem, so I tucked it away in Google Drive and forgot about it…until the night before submissions for Voice & Virtue Issue One were due, and I was desperately rifling through my archives of old poems in search for this one because I knew I wanted to rewrite it and finally finish it the way it was meant to be finished.
Where did Jesus get inspiration for His earthly acts of love? I asked myself in this poem. Of course, His great heart of love came from the Father—God is the source of love—but where did He learn His earthly expressions of humility? I thought of who showed me how to make handmade candy for loved ones, who taught me the habit of writing letters of encouragement to the suffering, who modeled for me the way to press flowers to create gifts for friends: my mother.

While, in His essence, Jesus is not only human but also God and is therefore not subject in a spiritual sense to any human, I do believe that, when He was born to an earthly family within the conventions and limitations of our world, He likely followed His earthly parents’ lead and instruction as any human child ought to do. I think, with a chuckle, of the story of the wedding at Cana in chapter two of the Gospel of John and how Jesus began His miraculous ministry to demonstrate His Lordship, yes, and also because His mother told Him to.
Under the care of His earthly parents, I think it’s likely that Jesus learned from them just what it looks like to love the people of this earth through sharing life with them.
In this poem, then, I imagined not Jesus’ thoughts and feelings as Mary washed His feet but what it felt like to be His mother—not when He was turning water into wine or greeting her for the first time after His resurrection, but when she was still performing the mundane tasks of motherhood for Him. Washing His feet. Patting them dry with a towel. Murmuring words of encouragement. Showing Him how humans love one another.
If you look closely at the poem, you’ll notice that, in my imagination of this childhood scene, Mary whispers something to Jesus that will later make its way into His Sermon on the Mount. I am not asserting that Mary was the inspiration behind the sermon—God inspired His words that day—but I have to ask, could it be possible that the phrasings of some of Jesus’ sayings were influenced by the woman who first taught His earthly tongue to speak?
In the end, the craft of my poem turned out far different from the original, maintaining only the wording of the first two lines and the general structure of the narrative. Those of us who know poetry will know that one of the most important acts in writing a poem is cutting away what doesn’t breathe life into the poem, and so this poem, in its final form, is much shorter than what it used to be. I also discarded the vague nod to the structure of the sonnet and simply wrote in couplets because I didn’t find the sonnet structure necessary.
More importantly, I finally discovered who this poem was meant to be written about, and while the image of the organization leader washing the feet of one of her volunteers is still a scene emblazoned in my mind, that’s for a later poem, I’m sure. I wanted to start not with the echo but with the source of the melody itself: Jesus and the faithful woman who taught Him the daily life of the people He came to save.
About the Author
Rachel Lynne Sakashita is a blogger and full-time Japanese language student who lives with husband in Pennsylvania. Her work can be found at The Clayjar Review, The Truly Co., Heart of Flesh Literary Journal, or her Substack, Ewe and Shepherd. Find her on Instagram at @abrightaubade.
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