The Grace Gentle Touch

(notes for a Tablet article that remained unfinished – but worth sharing!)

Every day I notice faces that ache to be touched.  As people come with heavy hearts for a healing conversation, or with heavy sins for Confession, I think about the last time that the anxious edges of around their mouths and eyes were touched by a loving hand.  Maybe never since childhood.  At our workshops on hand-massage, there’s nearly always someone who will tearfully admit to being unable to remember a time when someone held their hands in such a gently way.

When frail and fragile people stand before us, leaden-eyed and hopeless, something tells me that the first thing that Jesus would have done is to hold them tenderly.  Then their taut bodies relax, their breathing changes and the tears begin to flow.

We are exquisitely designed to be looked at, to be held, to be enveloped with tenderness.  Just as God, according to Celtic folklore, placed a healing for all human illnesses somewhere in the vastness of creation, so too, God has built into the miracle of our humanity – mind, body and spirit – the assuaging of the hurt without which our wounds would stay bleeding.

This awareness calls for an extraordinary sensitivity to the holiness of everything and everybody we encounter each day.  Gradually we develop another way of being present to all that happens in our lives.  Everything becomes more important because nothing remains ordinary anymore.  The routine assumes a new significance.

Everything is seen to have its place in the grand scheme of things because, as Richard Rohr holds, everything belongs.  We don’t take as many things for granted anymore – especially the world of the senses – those thresholds of the soul.

It is in our humanity that the miracles happen.  Everything of value has to do with our daily experiences.   Our feelings do not lie.  They are the litmus-test of what is true, what is really real.  It is how we are in the ordinary moments of each day that makes us special; how we talk to neighbours, say ‘hello’ at the door, smile at the stranger on the street, compliment someone on her turn of phrase, touch his tie.

Such are the people who enable us to understand ourselves, who give us permission to think the thoughts and feel the feelings we hide within us.

“If you wish to advance into the infinite, explore the finite in all directions”  (Goethe)

Is it not true that if we all had our deepest wish granted, we would simply start to play?  If only, for a moment, we were released from our crippling ego-control, would we not go barefoot and dance?  The greatest beginning of all is the beginning of being free to be, free from fear.  Is that not why God became a vulnerable baby and why that vulnerable baby became the willing victim of people’s hate and anger, and faced his deadly Jerusalem.  It was all a shocking waste of a beautiful life if it does not result in our transformation – from our existential anxiety into a daily, tangible kind of fierce belief in our ultimate capacity to win through.  “In the middle of my winter,” wrote the poet, “I discovered an invincible summer.”

Every so often a poem by A. J.  Tessimond, comes into my head.

“One day people will touch and talk perhaps easily,

and loving will be natural as breathing and warm as sunlight.

And people will untie themselves as string is unknotted;

unfold and yawn and stretch and spread their fingers;

unfurl, uncurl like seaweed returned to the sea.

And work will be simple and swift as a seagull flying.

And play be as casual and quiet as a seagull settling.

And the clocks will stop, and no one will wonder, or care, or notice.

And people will smile without reason, even in winter

and even in rain.”