THE POWER OF TOUCH
Rev. Dr. Joyce Antila Phipps
Old First Church
Texts: The wisdom of Solomon 1: 1-11; Mark 5: 21-43
Most of you didn’t know Mac McCullough, a retired minister who was a member here at Old First, but he told me about visiting a man dying of the mysterious disease we now call AIDS back in the early eighties. At that time, no one was really quite sure what caused the disease or how it was transmitted. The only thing medical personnel knew was that it seemed to spread quickly and they suspected some form of human contact contributed to its spread.
The nurse instructed Mac to put on a hospital gown, cover his face and wear those old thick vinyl gloves and to stay away from the patient lest Mac himself contract the dreaded disease. Although Mac dutifully nodded his head, as soon as the nurse left the room, he removed the face mask and took off the gloves and soothed the man's forehead with a damp cloth. And as he sat down, he held his hand. The dying man asked Mac if he was afraid and Mac told me that he replied that Jesus would not have backed off. Neither would he.
When the nurse peeked in, she became, visibly upset, scolding Mac that he would now catch this thing that killed people so quickly. Mac just smiled and continued to hold the man's hand. Although the man died shortly afterward, he told Mac that what he missed the most about his illness was that people were afraid to touch him. He wanted to be touched. He needed to be touched.
We humans tend to think of touch as a human phenomenon; however, all mammals need to be touched, caressed, and held as a sign of love and care. Some of you may remember several years ago we had a program by a husband-wife team of visiting missionaries. Barbara told us about caring for orphaned elephants, about the way that they constantly needed to be stroked by the rescuers, how if a baby elephant was not stroked, it would not eat.
And, of course, there is the famous Harry Harlow experiment with rhesus monkeys wherein babies were separated from their mothers and given two types of dolls, one terrycloth that had no food and a wire doll that had food. The babies did not cling to the wire but to the terrycloth doll, throwing the doll's arms over themselves for affection. That is what touch is ultimately about – affection. Without touch we shrivel up. Touch is essential to our lives.
Abraham Verghese is a physician uses the power of touch to develop trust with his patients. “We need more touch, not less,” he said at a medical conference as he lamented the development of doctors huddled around computers rather than patients. Unfortunately, our society has created a situation that keeps adults from touching children, who so desperately need good touch. We are told not to touch, that it might get us in trouble, not to hold, not to hug when being touched, being held, being hugged is exactly what children need.
In many of the immigrant groups that I frequent, babies and children are passed around, held and cuddled by many different adults. During the lockdown and the “no-touch” time, parents and children became fidgety. Mothers now again regularly pass off their babies to me and I coo with them, sometimes resulting in the baby laughing, sometimes not. Then, of course, I pass the baby back.
We adults, too, need to be touched and held or we shrivel up inside. When we lose a spouse or partner, part of the emptiness we feel comes from the lack of daily touching by the one we've lost. The touch we lose is much more than sex. It's the loss of intimacy developed over the years, from just holding someone's hand or brushing against the other. The need to touch and be touched often drives people into relationships before they are really ready to make commitments to another person.
During the worst of the lockdown, even family members became afraid of touching each other. The dying in nursing homes and hospitals could not be comforted by the touch of someone they loved or loved them. Sometimes we laughed at the idea of the so-called elbow bump but what it really reflected was our real fear of infection.
We use the language of touch when we talk about God. How often have you heard that someone has been touched by his conscience? Or by an angel? Or by a mystical experience that enables us to move beyond the concrete?
There's a dark side to touch, of course. Look at the pedophiles who have hurt children through the way they have touched. And it's that fear of pedophilia that has kept us from creating situations where there can be safe touch. As a society, we need to re-evaluate how we look at touch and spend time on creating conditions of safe touching.
Touching someone is an act wherein we reach beyond our own safe space. When we touch another person, we reach into that other person's space. That is why touch is also threatening, not just to the person being touched but to the one doing the touching. Reaching into someone else's space is a deliberate act that says we are not alone or autonomous in this universe. It says we cannot exist without the other. Part of our national myth is the lone person managing with self-sufficiency. People may manage all right, but that's about all they can do. To be fully human means to be engaged with others; in fact, I daresay, it's a requirement of being fully human. We are not little automatons but are part of a wider community that we reach into and that reaches into us.
Jesus understood the power of touch. The woman who touched Jesus' cloak understood that she was – for lack of a better phrase – invading his space. Just as Jesus felt power go out from him, so we often feel power and control slip from us when we are touched by another. Sometimes it's a feeling we don't like.
Lovers and partners, of course, are supposed to embrace that loss of ultimate control. When family members touch each other, they are saying that they are part of another and that the other is a part of them. Touching is not an act of control. It is a yielding of control to the other. So when the woman touched Jesus' cloak, she was yielding control to the power she felt Jesus had to heal her.
Verghese talked about touch in terms of trust, but it's even more than that. Doctors who touch their patients are, in effect, yielding control to their patients. That's something doctors generally don't like to do. Most of us aren't so different. It's difficult to yield control to another, to embrace someone else into one's own space because, then, our power of control is gone out from us and we are part of the other person. But that's also the essence of community: yielding to others, recognizing that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.
Let us open our hearts to God and to each other in prayer: Power and Grace of the Universe, touch us with your love so we may share that love with others as we touch and are touched. In the name of him who touched everyone, even Christ Jesus our Lord, Amen.