The Grace of Touch
The Grace of Touch
Timothy Jones
On Embodiment and Tangible, Timeless Mystery
I knew our relationship had taken a turn when she clasped my hand in hers.
Some days before, Jill and I were heading back from seeing a Broadway play in New York City, an hour’s bus ride from Princeton, where we were students. “I’m attracted to you,” I had said right after we got off the bus, having rehearsed the lines dozens of times in my mind. “I don’t know if I should encourage those feelings.”
Jill stammered something about being flattered. Later I learned she was silently flummoxed—worrying that she had sent unintended signals. We had been enjoying one another’s company—as friends. Now my blurted sharing of feelings hung in the air. It was a short walk from the bus stop to our dorms, and not much more was said. You’ve complicated our simple camaraderie, I chided myself. I was not exactly socially suave.
But within a day or two she called me. She and a friend, a resident on her dorm hall, were going to walk to get his car from a gas station garage where he had left it for an oil change. “Wanna come along?” Jill asked.
“Sure!”
The three of us met up, walking the sidewalk to the garage. That’s when she reached for my hand, our palms warm, fingers interlocking. She didn’t say much. There would be plenty of time to talk—that would come later through decades of marriage. But never will I forget that moment. One hand grasping another’s, mine responding in kind, conveyed more than words. The way we related would change forever.
*
It is good to remember that our five senses connect us to the good world God has made. Augustine knew that sometimes God gets through to us through our bodily perceptions. “You, Lord my God,” he prayed, “are the giver of life and a body to a baby. As we see, you have endowed it with senses. You have co-ordinated the limbs.”
For all his supposed suppression of the fleshly and corporeal, Augustine wanted to be present to his senses. He wanted to meet God through what he could detect and notice. Rather than deter (or detour) us, our senses can lead us to deeper insight or growth. One of his prayers ticks off every one of our five available senses for experiencing God—ending with touch: “You called and cried out loud and shattered my deafness. You were radiant and resplendent, you put to flight my blindness. You were fragrant, and I drew in my breath and now pant after you. I tasted you, and I feel but hunger and thirst for you. You touched me, and I am set on fire to attain the peace which is yours.”
*
Jesus, of course, used his gentle touch to help and heal, blessing children who clambered onto his lap. Parents, Luke tells us, brought babies to him for his gestured blessing. He used his hands to daub spit mixed with dirt as a restoring balm for sightless eyes. No wonder, through the millennia since, “laying on of hands” has always been a traditional part of healing. As I discovered during that walk with Jill, even more than what we say, a world of meaning comes to us through touch. Great grace can be mediated in this most basic of our senses.
“I hear your words,” writes Frederick Buechner, “I see your face. I smell the rain in your hair, the coffee on your breath.” All these things go on, he says, but the self in me, the self in you, the other, do not connect until another turn takes place. Something more tangible.
As Buechner notes, whatever our experience of another person, whatever our exchange or banter, true deepening happens in an embodied way: “We shake hands perhaps,” he goes on. “We pat each other on the back. At parting or greeting, we may even go so far as to give each other a hug.” Only then, he says, do we “discover each other to be three-dimensional, solid creatures of reality. … Through simply touching, more directly than in any other way, we can transmit to each other something of the power of the life we have inside us.” We may know what is most inwardly personal through our most outward of senses. In a culture insistently nudging us to virtual “reality,” pulling us into a disembodied online world, we need to reconnect in the most basic bodily ways.
And how much we miss when deprived of another’s tangibly felt presence! The pandemic has driven this reality deeper into our consciousness like nothing else: we so isolated ourselves out of fear of contagion—the seemingly dangerous way touch could communicate the virus—that we learned afresh what happens when people come together and experience a human contact: the assurance that comes from a hand laid on the shoulder, or the aromas and tangible sensations of sitting and jostling around a dinner table with extended family. A single friend whose children and grandchildren all live a good distance away confessed to me not long in with the pandemic, “I realized I haven’t felt a human touch for three months.”
I think of how, as one commentator put it as pandemic bodies piled up outside hospitals in semi-truck trailers, captured by nightly news photos, “When you die, you die alone.” I think of adult children watching their parents die from a distance, not able to hold their hands or give them a parting kiss.
After almost three years of managing to avoid it, this past December, Jill and I both came down with more or less mild COVID cases. Harder than the physical effects—given our modest symptoms, at least—harder than wearing masks when in the same room, were the deprivations of touch in our quarantining from each other. For a hug of encouragement or affection to become a means of re-infection? Nothing about it felt natural. As people wired to relate and reach out, such connecting is clearly fundamental to life and growth.
*
Of course, there are dangers. “Touchy-feely” is almost always pejorative—meaning sentiment and joviality gone awry—gone too far. Rather than move us, an ill-placed too-familiar pat can put us off, make us wary, incur harm. Uninvited touch from a person in a position of power can be fraught, offend, or abuse. What is good and wholesome in the right context can cause the worst kind of pain. And chronic conditions can make sensation a pain we dread. Torture relies on the fact that our bodies are sensitive in the most vulnerable ways. The stripes of a whip on an enslaved person’s back caused deep wounds, not only on the bare back but also underneath the surface.
When it comes to our spiritual health, the sensory can lead to the merely sensuous. When we headlong pay attention only to our nerve endings, our insides become immune to the immense Real. Touch’s demands are not always an unmitigated good. The ascetic tradition reminds us that the pursuit of pleasurable touch can dull soul and spirit. At times, we must withstand the pull of sensorily sumptuous to focus more sharply, less distractedly on that which is beyond this world. Asceticism at its best helps us learn anew to resist what Eugene Peterson called our “relentlessly anesthetic,” soul-numbing world.
Perhaps this helps explain a gnostic pull, a perennial temptation in spiritual circles, to downplay the physical and bodily. To do so forgets how a gentle pressure of a helping hand can stretch across a distance and convey more than simply the tactile. How a palm laid on a trembling head or agitated heart can calm and heal. A prayer said out loud for the sick matters, but a pastoral hand laid on the forehead of a parishioner confined to a hospital bed is like the touch of God himself.
My own spiritual alertness often benefits from touch; the feel of a cooling breeze on my face, the fluttering of my shirt in the wind, and the warmth of a spring day declare the glories of God’s creation stirring awake during a spreading dawn. Physical events wake me from my groggy doldrums.
This morning, while it was still dark, I arose early to sit in silence in my living room before the day began. To help me focus in prayer, I took a string of wooden beads (according to an Eastern Orthodox custom, not very different from use of a rosary) and gently pulled each of the fifty pill-sized rounds through my fingers, repeating with each nub the simple “Jesus Prayer”: “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me.” With the distinct feel of each bead between forefinger and thumb helping to focus my heart and soul, I can then move on to more spontaneous prayers. I read verses from the Bible with a clearer heart. I enjoy the God I cannot see with my eyes or feel with my hands by being stimulated by what I can sense. I marvel how often touch can wake up our concentration. It can ground our wandering minds in what is right around us or even within us.
The weekly Eucharist was one reason I was drawn into a liturgical church after sojourning with other denominations. Of the many ways the Eucharist moves me, including the recitation of our salvation story in Christ, I like the sheer physicality of the bread—its feel in my palm and fingertips. The metallic chalice that I lift to my lips (or, post-pandemic, the thimble cup I grasp from a silver tray) partakes of vast mysteries. The immensities of atonement descend into a mere wafer, a tiny vessel of wine that I pick up with thumb and forefinger, that I see and feel before I smell or taste.
At the basilica in Rome, it is a custom of pilgrims to touch or kiss the statue of Saint Peter’s bronzed feet, especially his right one. Through the centuries, countless touches or reverent kisses have thinned and polished it, so much so that the big toe of the foot bears the unusual marks of metal worn down by the continual, gentle friction of pilgrim ages. Sentimental piety? I think instead there are times we need to feel our way to the divine. We try to make contact with timeless Mystery by turning to the tangible.
*
There was a couple. Like me and Jill, they too had joined hands, had reached for one another, but against a terrible backdrop—while they jumped to escape the horror of the South Tower, fleeing the smoke and billowing fire.
I only recently learned of them. I don’t think anyone knows who they were. As essayist Brian Doyle, wonders: Were they friends, romantic partners? Or maybe colleagues at work, thrown together in a last act, hand reaching for hand before they leapt from the scorching inferno of what had been their office? A bystander taking an escalator that morning into the Trade Center in New York, saw the couple leaping from a thousand feet up. More than one person witnessed their interlocked hands as they fell.
This was a very different scenario for the solace of hand-holding. I go back in my imagination to that scene of desperation, two people seizing hands in defiance against the terror and crushing impact that would crumple their bodies. Against a firestorm they joined hands in one last, one very human impulse. I see it as more than an instinctual act, but also a kind of prayer. Their reaching was, as Doyle writes, “everything that we are capable of against horror and loss and death.”
The mystery of the power of touch in the scene from that morning silences me, shutting up my glib answers. The couple were just two of hundreds facing the awful choice that was no real choice at all, to leap, some of them already afire, flailing as they fell. The things that cause us dread, or make us dream, or jolt the heart with joy often meet in a touch, a hand. A simple gesture reminds us once again that we play out our everyday dramas under celestial realities, as hand-touching-hand makes the swings the world may yet take at us more bearable.
Timothy Jones
Writer & Pastor
The Rev. Timothy Jones blogs at revtimothyjones.com. He is pastor of St. John’s Episcopal Church in Halifax, Virginia, and the former dean of Trinity Episcopal Cathedral in Columbia, South Carolina. He is writing a book on ways the Trinity can warm our daily experience of God.
Photography by Omid Armin
