Practising presence 6: the ordinary miracle of touch
Well, here we are turning to the last of our senses: touch.
I think of touch as the rebel of the senses: refusing to fit in a box, escaping easy definition.
Think about it...
Is “touch” restricted to intentional feeling, as when we actively feel something with our hands or feet or some other part of our bodies? Or does touching also include the sensation of being touched? Or perhaps the distinction between active and passive touching is irrelevant because it’s impossible to touch and not be touched. Is what we are touching, always touching us back?
As well as evading simple definition, touch refuses to stay distinct from the other four senses.
This is clearest in taste where we touch with our mouths and it’s fairly easy to accept in smell, since the air must touch our nostrils to spark neural pathways. And yet even vision and hearing involve touching. For us to see, light needs to touch our retinas, for us to hear, vibrations must touch our ear drums. Most of the time we don’t feel this (so, depending on your definition of touch, perhaps it’s not strictly touching), but sometimes we do. If you need convincing, think about how your eyes hurt if you look at something too bright or how you feel ringing in your ears after a concert or other loud event.
Without touch there is no sensation. All day, every day we are both touched and touching with every sensory organ available to us.
While sight is the sense most human societies have prioritised, I have a hunch that touch is the central sense.
How you feel about the centrality of touch probably reveals something of how you feel about what most of us think of when we hear the word "touch" - physical contact with another human being. Touch is not everyone’s favoured love language. And yet we all need to be touched. We all need a certain amount of touch to feel secure. Touch starvation in early years leads to anxiety and depression but a lack of touch at any time has negative health implications.
A longing for the experience of human touch cannot be remedied any other way. In spiritual direction, people sometimes talk about loneliness but it’s not always a felt absence of Divine presence that they are experiencing. Time and again, I hear “I know I’m not alone, I know that I am “held”. But where are the arms to comfort me?” Spiritualised holding is all very well but when our bodies are hungry to be touched, only physical touch will do.
Perhaps this shared longing for a tactile encounter with the Divine goes some way to explaining why Jesus healed through touch. Not because touch was necessary for supernatural healing but because Love sees and knows our need to be touched. As both Augustine and Aquinas explain, miracles do not violate nature but go beyond the order usually observed in nature. By healing through touch, Jesus both honours and miraculously intensifies the innate healing quality of touch.
Not everyone longs for healing from what makes us different or society says is “wrong”. Jesus honours this by never forcing healing. People come to him to be healed rather than he to them and he respects their agency by asking questions ("What do you want me to do for you?" Mark 10.51). I wonder, though, if any of those who came forward for healing, came because they simply wanted to be with the loving presence they recognised as embodied in Jesus. I wonder if some came longing not for supernatural healing but for the ordinary miracle of being touched - that whole-making or perhaps whole-revealing healing of being held by someone you trust. A healing from disconnection that affirms that, yes, you are known, you are accepted, you are loved, you do belong.
When directees begin to notice their hunger for human touch, I offer lots of space. We welcome the feelings and we wander around in the stories they tell. And then, if it feels right, I might gently offer an invitation to explore what is holding them now. The chair, the floor, the air, their clothing, their own arms. If we are in person, I ask if they would like a hug. It’s not supernatural but it is healing.
This week, my invitation is to be curious about what is touching you or offering itself to be touched. Notice texture, heat and pressure - all those wonderful experiences made possible through touch. Ask yourself what is holding you and play with paying attention to the feel of your clothes against your skin, the support of your seat, the ground beneath your feet. Notice the feel of your own touch and if you are fortunate to hold and be held by someone you trust, receive the ordinary miracle of its healing.
As you touch and are touched, you may like to see if you can receive it all as a sacrament - a physical sign of a spiritual reality. A witness to the Love that holds you and me and all in one sacred embrace.
Jen x