| Cathleen Falsani

Is your sole saved? Lincoln Park spa can help

There’s something terribly humbling about having anyone, particularly a stranger, wash my feet.

Humbling for me, I mean, not the other person dealing with my rough soles, sandal scars, and that especially funky little toe next to the pinky on my left foot.

I’m guessing humbled was not quite the desired effect purveyors of the swanky new Lincoln Park spa/boutique/yoga studio Ame: A Sanctuary for Your Senses were going for.

In French, “ame” means “soul.”

“We want to touch people’s souls and help them get back in touch with themselves,” Tamara Duckler, the spa’s co-owner, was telling me the other day. “We want this to be a sanctuary where women or men and children can come and relax and forget about the hustle and bustle of the outside world.”

The cover of Ame’s spa menu warns visitors to “prepare your senses to be awakened.. . . Your sanctuary doors are now opened.”

Senses duly forewarned, the “sanctuary doors” of the spa on West Armitage opened for me Thursday morning revealing a quiet, candlelit room with four throw-pillow-laden, earth-toned chenille chaises topped by silk-chiffon canopies.

Very Cleopatra-meets-Mae-West-in-Marrakesh.

A Zen stone fountain trickled away in the corner, and plinky-plunky vaguely Vangelis piano music piped in softly from somewhere overhead. Resting on a mantlepiece across from my settee was a large sepia-toned print of what I thought was a monk or a nun crouching, hands folded in prayer.

Turns out it’s an angel down on one knee.

“The whole image and meaning behind it just kind of fits the place,” Duckler said.

Little did I know.

I had come for a “rejuvenating” manicure and pedicure.

“This manicure and/or pedicure focuses on rejuvenating your hands/feet and your soul,” read Ame’s description of what I had dubbed “my spiritual pedicure.”

Greeting me at the door with a wide smile and just a hint of a bow was Van Le, a 25-year-old Vietnamese immigrant and licensed nail technician.

Le escorted me to the appointed chaise and I hopped up onto the pile of pillows, as he carried a large brass bowl of warm, soapy water over and took a seat on a low wooden bench at my feet.

“Please,” he said, motioning for me to put my feet in the bowl.

He cupped his hands and let water run over my ankles, washing my feet, before scrubbing my calves with sea salt and massaging my toes.

It was, as pedicures go, quite marvelous.

I think I was supposed to feel like a queen, perched up there on a cushiony throne peeking out from my canopied sanctuary as I drank green tea and plucked red grapes from a tray laid beside me.

I did, for a time.

Leaning back with a small, scented flax-and-herb pillow over my eyes, I thought about how nice it was to relax and abandon the urban chaos of my life for a few moments. I deserved this break. I work hard.

Yes, indeed. Queen for a day, lah dee dah. . . . And then the soul portion of the treatment kicked in.

I looked up at the angel kneeling on the wall, and down at the angel gently trimming the cuticles on my feet, and thought about God.

Footwashing has a long spiritual history. In Islam, for instance, washing your own feet is part of the daily purifying ritual known as Wudu, prescribed by the Quran, that must be completed before entering the state of prayer.

In Christendom, according to the Gospel of St. John, Mary of Bethany anointed Jesus’ feet with oil and wipes them with her hair. At the time it was a sign of hospitality for a host, or more specifically a host’s servants, to wash the feet of visitors who were pretty grubby after traveling in sandals over dusty roads.

At his last Passover supper with his disciples, the story in St. John’s Gospel says, Jesus grabbed a towel and a basin of water and washed their feet. “You do not know what I am doing,” Jesus told his disciple Peter, “but later you will understand.”

Until recently Le, who came to the United States from Vietnam 11 years ago, traded stocks for a living. His sister owns a nail salon in Bloomingdale, and he put in 400 hours of study to become a technician in California before he moved to Chicago last year. He began working at Ame last week.

“I lost too much money with stocks, so it was time to go back to work,” Le, who is Buddhist, told me when I interrupted the contemplative stillness of the darkened treatment room to pepper him with questions.

Does he like doing this?

“Yes,” he said, smiling again, as he applied a deep sanguine varnish to my nails with great care. “It is fine.”

Nearly two hours after I had arrived, with freshly scrubbed, trimmed, buffed and polished fingers and toes, Le escorted me to the door. We both folded our hands in front of us for a quick second, bowed and mouthed, “Namaste,” which means, loosely, “the God in me greets the God in you.”

It wasn’t the first time I’ve had a pedicure, it wasn’t the first time I’ve had a conversation with the person doing it, and it wasn’t the first time I was grateful for how the technician had cared for me.

But it was the first time I recognized the intrinsic grace of the act.

Who am I?

I should be washing Le’s feet.

But as Ame, despite its ethereal ambiance and the big Buddha statue on the third floor, is a place of business, and because Le is a consummate professional, it seemed inappropriate to offer.

There was nothing inherently more spiritual about the “spiritual pedicure” than my usual $20 pedi at a hole-in-the-wall downtown.

Maybe Ame’s more meditative atmosphere allowed me to see the ritual for what it really is.

Or perhaps I was simply humbled by the presence of an angel.