I’ve been thinking more and more about physical touch, a subject I explore in my first book Affect Theory, Shame, and Christian Formation. The concept of touch – its presence and its frequent absence – beckons me again. In several posts, I will explore aspects of touch to get to my central concern – how good touch indicate, supports, and fosters intimacy, something confounding in human relationality. For this post, I consider the Christian tradition and touch.
In Tactile Engagements in Christian Understanding, Teresa Swan Tuite examines touch in biblical history as one way of “making explicit the ways in which bodies give sense to the theological landscape.” Swan Tuite brings to bear the notion of being known through touch, using as one example the disciple’s recognition of Jesus through touch in the Gospel of John. Caravaggio’s famous painting The Incredulity of St. Thomas depicts the scene which Shelly Rambo details in her blog post on this site.
Swan Tuite expands her critique challenging the tradition’s focus on the visual and auditory identifying a tactile landscape in Christian practice and theology. Let’s trace the landscape:
- In Leviticus 5:3 and 6:18, touch constitutes a transmittal: touching something either unclean or sacred bequeaths the properties of that thing to the flesh it meets.
- In Job 19:21, the hand of God “touches” Job and exacerbates his suffering. God’s touch is punitive in this case.
- In Daniel 10, Daniel has a vision in which a messenger from God touches him, he moves from a position of prostration to his hands and knees. The angel then touches his lips so he can speak and touches him once more to strengthen him. Touch incites empowerment.
- In the Gospel of Matthew, several poignant occasions of touch reveal that physical contact with Jesus is transformational. Jesus touches a leper, cleansing and healing him (8:1-4). Jesus takes the hand of a dying girl and revives her (9:25). Jesus touches the eyes of two blind men, enabling them to see (9:29). In the same chapter, a woman reaches out to touch Jesus’ cloak to be healed from hemorrhages. Jesus senses the energy leaving him and turns to her, declaring that her faith healed her.
Touch, in all cases, inspires emotional shifts for all those engaged in contact, even in Jesus himself. Powerful, threatening, and possessing the potential to signify pain and love, touch touches all of us.
This power of touch reverberates in the Christian textual tradition. Augustine’s idea of touch corroborates the variety of biblical interpretations of touch revealing some of his perceptions of touch’s complexity. In his Confessions, he uses touch to express the consummation of an experience of devotion to God. Augustine addresses God, “You touched me, and I am set on fire to attain the peace which is yours.” Being so touched, he is therefore blessed with grace and capable of sharing in God’s light. Touch in this sense bears grace and heals. Although moments in Augustine’s writing portray touch as tainted or material, he uses touch more frequently to convey passionate devotion to God. Thus, his primary aim is total connection with God.
The saints and mystics also express passionate, intimate relating to God or the divine, where touch serves, either metaphorically or actually, as the pathway to deeper spiritual connection with God.
- In The Journey of the Mind to God, Saint Bonaventure experiences the soul as embracing Christ; divine connection, expressed as a physical act, comes to its greatest apex at the moment of contact.
- St. Francis receives the stigmata and bears the wounds of Christ. Through this mirroring of wounding, God enters the body by means of touching the flesh.
- The French mystic Marguerite Porete expresses a similar entrance of God into her own soul as being “touched by God.” This touch initiates her ascent through the seven stages of grace.
These examples of touch (not exhaustive of course) reflect that “God is made known to us through touch” as a source of most intimate relating to others and the world.
Touch is a critical part of human life. Without it, infants die. Even the slightest touch alters biology. Indeed, even before a fetus has eyes and ears it responds to touch. Ashley Montagu’s shows this and more in her Touching: The Human Significance of the Skin. Physical contact is critical to the capacity to grow and thrive. Without touch, we experience Bruce Perry and Maia Szalavitz’s idea of skin hunger. If we think of touch as an amplification of being seen, an aspect in every biblical example, the potential for a mutual recognition of regard transpires. In this way, touch takes on the radical aspect of substantiating existence.
Touch substantiates our existence. When touched rightly, with care and respect, we are known, more deeply, more intimately. The Christian tradition offers a foundation for imagining what this intimacy looks like especially when it is shared. How we access and maintain this good intimate touch, especially when we are alone or struggle with being touched, is another obstacle to be reflected upon in another post.
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“Physical contact is critical to the capacity to grow and thrive” ALL living beings on this planet need to be touched…
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Great post, and really fascinating context regarding the meaning and power of touch woven throughout Christian tradition, thank you.
I’ve been fascinated by the power of touch since I learned the art of craniosacral therapy. I was deeply moved by experiences of both giving and receiving this technique of very light, healing touch. I’ve mused ever since about the astonishing and mysterious power in our hands which seems to be indicated in myth, practice, and symbology from around the world. For instance, the healing practice of mudras in yogic tradition. That our heart channels (according to Traditional Chinese Medicine) pass just beneath the skin in the center of the palms of the hands. That hands are marked with a red dot in exactly this spot in Indian dance, drawing attention to the intricate gestures of the hands as they tell a sensual and captivating story. The universal symbol of the Hamsa (with either an eye or a vulva represented in the same location as the Chinese acupuncture heart points). The stories of Jesus healing with his hands. That Jesus was crucified with nails passing through exactly this point in the center of his hands. The art and ritual of traditional circle dances, where participants hold hands and move in rhythm together, creating a sense of coherence and solidarity in community.
I believe that we’ve been terribly misguided by not learning and deeply appreciating that we too have this magical, healing, life-affirming power in our own hands…
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What a great piece of writing, thank you, Stephanie. When I was a student of psychotherapy at the Gestalt institute in Toronto, part of my experiential learning was sensory perception, sight, hearing, touching, tasting, smelling and knowing are the gateways into higher awareness/consciousness. In fact deepening our five senses is the gateway to our six sense, knowing/intuition. Their is a saying in psychotherapy, the body loves and needs pleasure and of course this is true. Witnessing the movie fifty shades of grey allowed a cultural window for me into how sacred sexuality was inverted, pain is pleasure, humiliation is care/love, so deeply twisted, I felt. To be honest it was hard for me to sit past five minutes of this movie though I wanted a cultural pulse, so I endured. The sad part for me was how so many women embraced this movie, isn’t this great they said, which was a clear indication for me how culturally, women had forgotten sacred sexuality. I understand how that could happen under 5,000 years of patriarchy, pornography, rape culture. I am writing Sacred Sexuality, Sacred Sexuality is about contact, what gestalt therapist call, I-thou here and now (experience), it’s about presence, (consciousness vs unconsciousness like fifty shades of grey was for me). It’s a book about pleasure because yeah, our bodies love and need pleasure.
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