Sense Making Faith - Lent 2009

This weeks’ Lenten reflection on touch, it’s significance and correlations to meanings beyond the immediacy of it’s exertion, have intrigued me.

First of all, may I say that I welcome whole-heartedly a renewed vision of a unified, embodied response to spirituality that we are seeing in the West. It’s long overdue after so many centuries of compartmentalising our lives into spiritual and non, sacred and secular. I understand why this line of thinking may have developed, but we ventured too far along that path. Somewhat of a return to the centre is necessary as a counter-balance, without becoming out-of-kilter once again in our search for the new, unknown or forgotten. Some may scoff or reel with suspicion at this movement. But, we need go no further than the recognition that the Creator made for us these wonderful bodies to experience life on this beautiful mess of an orb called Earth. There is after all, for those Platonically-inclined Faithful, a difference between the Soma and the Sarke. So, touch, in all of it’s complexity is where our journey has brought us this week.

There is no doubt that touch plays a significant role in our lives as human beings. From the earliest moments of our existence to our dying day, touch features as a prominent catalyst in our experience and formation as individuals. There has been much research done on this field of study, but even from our own personal experiences, we can attest to the influence and impact of touch - particularly within human relationships. Other studies have made human / animal relationships the focus of their efforts and have revealed the extremely positive affect animals have made in the lives of sick children in hospital or the elderly in retirement centres. Additionally, the development of new born infants and very young children is heavily influenced by the presence and consistency of comforting touch. Professor Darwin Muir of Queen’s University in Ontario, Canada has stated in a paper entitled, Adult Communications with Infants through Touch: The Forgotten Sense that “. . in humans the skin is the largest sensory organ, it is the first sensory system to develop in the uterus, the fetus receives extensive prenatal stimulation, and infants learn by touch at birth.” It’s obvious that we are communal creatures in need of reassuring, positive, regular touch from one another.

I was particularly moved by the image used at the beginning of this week’s guided Lenten reflection on the Churches Together in Britain and Ireland site. It’s of an infant’s hand grasping the finger of an adult - presumably its parent. It caught my attention because this week - God willing - I will become a parent . . for the third time. My wife has done such a fantastic job of creating wonderful little people that we desired to bring yet another into the family. Now, I thought that being a father would be cool, but in actuality, being a dad has been pure awesomeness! The experience of fatherhood has entailed all of the usual lack of sleep, dirty nappies and constant care that parents experience, but the connection and satisfaction of investing oneself in entirely new people who have the adventure of life ahead of them is exhilarating. So it is with great anticipation and hope that I begin gearing myself (and my wife of course!) up for yet another arrival; waiting to touch the little person I’ve been speaking to for months and hold the individual that is at the fore of their unfolding story. What wonder and mystery in it all! For me, it’s the ability to touch and hold my new child that ‘seals the deal’ and makes the arrival final. Up til now I have been imagining who this individual is, what they will look like and how it will feel having them in the family. The wait is almost over. This child will know his/her mother and father, brother and sister, primarily from the touch we give.

In reflecting on our five basic senses which constitute our primary interaction with our world, it seems to me that out of all of them, touch is the most significant. Not one of us would desire to be without any of them (although so many in our world live in such a way), but if we discerned the impact that each one - sight, smell, taste, hearing and touch - has upon us, I think our use of touch demonstrates its primacy. Sight and hearing are our most utilised senses. We take in everything - whether we process it or not - when our eyes and ears are open. In fact, when we sleep our sense of hearing is the sole function that never fully ceases to operate. Our eyes take in all that is set before them, often more than we are aware of as Jonny Baker illustrated in his post on Journey Into Seeing. Our sense of smell is limited by proximity to the source of the scent, and taste is even more limited to being in actual contact with the object of desire. Touch is unique in that it is the most identifiably employed sense when drawing our circles of relationship.

You can tell how ‘close’ someone is to another person by watching how they interact with one another through the use of touch. We assume that if two people allow their faces to touch they are either very close friends, family or lovers. We know by ‘how’ people touch (and in what place on their bodies) what type of relationship they have with one another. It’s not a perfect method of discerning the nature of relationships, but it is largely true that those we dislike or distrust we keep our distance from, those we only know as an acquaintance we limit to a handshake or ‘hello’ and those we partner with are allowed access that no one else is entitled to. This is painfully illustrated in the reality of relationships that have disintegrated due to trust and intimacy being violated through the giving of oneself (often, but not exclusively, through touch) to someone other than our partner. The most powerful, influential aspects of our human nature are those most misused and abused. Touch is no exception.

From the Christian understanding of God, we come to learn something very significant about touch and our bodily home. God embodied Himself in human form, wrapping Himself in flesh and became one of us. Subject to all of the same experiences of humanity, Jesus Christ felt pleasure, pain and the full spectrum of sensations in between. There are no shortage of examples in the Scriptures of Jesus intentionally touching people He encountered. He welcomed friends - the socially elite and the socially excluded - all in the same gesture of inclusion. His touch extended to all who came to Him for reassurance, healing or freedom. It was through Jesus’ touch that the Kingdom that He often spoke of revealed itself. We know too from the reading in Mark chapter 14 in this week’s study guide that Jesus felt the crushing blow of betrayal which led to His arrest. Judas Iscariot, arriving with a contingent of armed guards, identified Jesus to them by use of a gesture that is reserved for friends - a kiss. The act, one of relational intimacy, was turned on its head as something utilised for apparently selfish gain. This was, in essence, a ‘heartless’ act. A sign of intimacy enacted to detract from, and not bless, the recipient.

There is real beauty in the truth that God chooses to communicate to us through the lives of others. Each one of us has the ability and opportunity to join with God in His work of caring for and redeeming creation through acts of love to our fellow human beings. Service in any shape is an appropriate form of love when we see a need we can meet and we do something about it. Not to be lost in more obvious acts, we should never underestimate the power in a simple reassuring touch, aptly timed, to bring light into someone’s life. Just as in the ‘Free Hugs’ campaign by Australian Juan Mann, something so simple can make the world of difference to another. Life lived in the service of others offers the kind of feeling when you know that all is right in your world. Not that all is well and good in the world necessarily, but that all is right in your world. There is joy in the journey and hope along the way. This is a gift only God Himself can give. Jesus has shown us how to receive it in the example set in word and deed for all eternity.

Last week I was in London meeting a friend and this white bicycle caught my eye chained to the railings with the words life is not measured by the number of breaths we take but by the moments that take our breath away. I’m a visual person so I just had to get my camera out which I tend to carry with me at all times and take a photograph. I met the friend and after coffee we walked back to the tube past the bike. As we walked past I was waiting for her to notice it but she didn’t so I pointed it out as I thought it was so brilliant - I’ve since found out it’s a ghost bike. She liked it and was surprised when I said I’d already seen and photographed it. Her passing comment was that if I hadn’t said something she would not have seen it… which got me thinking how many things in front of our eyes don’t we see?

The most fun and perhaps shocking illustration of this is the genius cycling awareness advert the moonwalking bear. Watch the advert before reading on… How can we fail to see what is in front of our eyes? Perhaps seeing or looking is a discipline that we can learn or get better at. The mystics talk about awareness and learning to cultivate it through our senses being present in the blade of the moment. It’s actually one of the reasons I love photography. It helps me see, actually look at things, see differently - trying to explore a fresh angle or finding a way to make the ordinary look beautiful.

On the Sunday worship programme we heard the story of Blind Bartimaeus receiving the gift of his sight back when he met Jesus Christ. I jotted down a sentence I really liked that was used to introduce it - when we learn to see differently we learn to see God’s world in a new light. A youthworker in Cheltenham doing detached work on an estate told me a story of one of the lads he was working with. His sense of value and worth was fairly low and he would walk with his eyes down. Richard (the youthworker) felt there was a real breakthrough when this lad pointed out the hills surrounding Cheltenham that he had never noticed before even though they had been there his whole life! He had begun to see differently, he was lifting his horizon. That story prompted me to write a song that captures this idea of encounter with God helping us to see differently, to see the world charged with the presence of God, to lift our horizons. It’s an old tune now from the album Grace (see proost) but you can have a listen here or download the track for free. The lyrics are below (the second verse includes a quote from Mike Riddell’s wonderful book Godzone).

I lived in the shadows preventing me see
Though you were there you weren’t visible to me
But you came into my world and pointed out the trees
Helped me to encounter your mystery

I had seen the hills a thousand times before but it took someone to point them out to me
I had see the hills a thousand times before but it took someone to point them out to see

Now you’re waving in the trees
Laughing in the thunder
Dancing in the rain
Shining in old eyes
Crying in the breeze
Speaking in the silence
Your presence everywhere
The world is full of you

posted by jonny baker