Loading...In this issue of the newsletter appears the fifth and final article on the senses and how they help us to experience fully the presence of God in our common worship. In prior months, I have offered some thoughts about taste, smell, hearing, and sight. Now we turn to touch.
Touch is both the most differentiating sensation and also the most connective. It shows us very clearly where we end and the “other” begins. At the same time, it is the only sense that is itself the source of sensory experience for someone (or even something) beyond ourselves. We encounter and are encountered by the world around us as we move through it and make contact with it.
In a liturgical context, touch and bodily movement are very strongly related to culture. The prostrations of Eastern Orthodox Good Friday, the handshakes and hugs at the exchange of the peace in many Western European Christian traditions, the dancing at the offertory in some African churches, and the experience of being “slain in the Spirit” in many African-American churches all speak to a bodily experience of communal worship, but one that likely would feel very alien out of its context. This lends to touch a tentativeness, a greater caution than with the other senses to be sure that its use will be appropriate.
This is both a strength and a limitation of touch. Its capacity to enter and color the sensory experience of others is a legitimate caution to its use where such contact may be unwelcome. By the same token, it is a powerful means of embodying the Christian belief that we meet Christ in one another. Martin Luther famously said that we are “Christ’s hands and feet.” Seen in the light of Christ, the handshake in the narthex and the joining of hands at the Lord’s Prayer (as is common in some churches) represents to us Jesus’ acts of touching that restored and strengthened the community of his followers. In this way, touch makes concrete what the sound and visual components of liturgy cannot. The Christian author TJ Gorringe writes about a friend who worked for a time in India. After several months of giving and receiving the traditional greeting, the namaskaram (hands pressed together as in prayer), she began to feel profound alienation in the absence in this gesture of any physical contact. A hug from an Indian Christian theologian “restored her world to her.”
Even the bodily sensation of being in worship becomes part of one’s understanding of what it means. Many who are familiar with parish life will know or recall an often, but not always, older member who made clear which pew was “his” or “hers” and defended it energetically. Conversely, the first experience of a Latin Christian in an old-fashioned Eastern Orthodox church with few or no seats can be rather disorienting. The feeling of the carved poppy head on a pew-end, or the velvet of a seat cushion, or a candle held on Christmas or Easter Eve – these habits and sensations are often dismissed as unimportant, trivialities before the power of the Word. Yet, they are themselves the Word in physical form, the solidity and fruitfulness of creation brought into the liturgical assembly as evidence that God is God of the body, not just of the soul.
As has already been hinted at, gestures and the sensation of movement are near neighbors of touch. As an extreme example, one thinks of the mudras shown in pictures and statues of the Buddha and practiced in yoga. They symbolize cosmic actions and virtues which they are also understood to bring about. Philosopher David Levin sees in this a sense in which we can “think with our hands.” While this can rapidly spin off in unorthodox (in a Christian sense) directions, it is not without value in considering the gestures of the liturgy. The priest’s gestures and actions during the Eucharistic prayer are an example of the work of the hands, in aid of words, transforming the bread and wine. Indeed, any ritual gesture deepens and colors the words it accompanies simply by its existence, but also by the message it conveys about the physical reality that it represents.
And so a word or two to try to draw some common meaning from this series of articles. “Only when the ‘fullness’ of sensing, i.e., the reunion of the ‘material’ and ‘spiritual’ senses, becomes an intentional ‘art’ shall our vision of the universe be truly expanded to include the mystery of faith.” This is how Alejandro Garcia-Rivera describes the work of engaging all of the sensory resources in encountering God in the liturgy. The image of “intentional art” is appealing. It offers both a component of innate capacity and a component of training or honing of that capacity. The physical senses do indeed lead us, the worshipping community, into deeper understanding in the liturgy, but this is not a predictable or reproducible experience. The examples and connections offered in these articles are mine, in a certain place, on a certain day. Others might arise on another day, in another place, and faith teaches that the creativity of God is present in this evolution. The art lies in presenting all our senses, our embodied existence, to God in worship.
Blessings
Howie+
