In the previous post, we considered various tacit understandings of our bodies in space and the spiritual power of contact-less-ness:
“Contact-free” radicalises domestic boundaries and problematises all touch.
“Contact-free” betrays that touch confers moral and ontological essences.
Not-touching preserves the sacredness of sacred objects.
Not-touching constrains the activity of profane agents.
Delivery rituals and doorway architectures delineate today’s untouchables.
Now, warring against and ministering to this contact-less world, I consider that Christianity is a contact sport. Life is embodied and intersubjectively so:
Touch is Reembodying
Touch is a conduit for Resurrection
Touch is a non-optional Priority
Touch is a crucial Love Language
Touch should be the default, and so needs a clear language for exceptions
[6] Contact-free: Touch is Reembodying
“..The body is objectivity, materiality, exteriority and priority in the sense that it comes before subjectivity, our sense of self and activity. .. It’s embeddedness in the natural order, in tradition, in society and in culture - are simultaneously pre-conditions-for yet also resistance-to the freedom of my subjectivity and action. .. These root me in a particular place and identity. .. The body alerts us to the givenness of the self. .. We are not autonomous. I must always express myself from the unchosen site of identity and meaning represented by my body..” Baptism and the Body - Alastair Roberts
“..A friend reported that a venture capitalist recently told her he saw a “touchless” future. I fear this is what the technocrats and AI people and fascists are dreaming of – a touchless future. The body has always been that lowly human thing that got in the way..” Touch saved me from loneliness - V (formerly Eve Ensler) - Guardian
6.1 Necessary Body.
💪 You have a body. Despite the hype of proto-cyborg ontologies, and the tantalising myth that we can, by shades, become transhuman and be unfettered from fleshly baggage.. You have a body. And indeed, you are a body. You are not merely a body, mind. And it is no easy addition of body+mind. As-body and as-more-than-body, it is nevertheless impossible for you to disentangle your being and your knowing from your bodying - for, we know and we think and we remember and we communicate with our bodies.
🧠 Body-optional Faith. Most Christianities are not completely disembodied, but. Christianity at large is predominantly body-optional. The cerebral creed performs a basic functional gnosticism and promotes a subtly dichotomised soul-saving framework of prioritising intangible activities of heart and mind over the bodily after-the-facts. Seen in the degree to which the extensive and extended closure of churches has been so under-protested ~ reflecting how non-essential our embodied togethering is in our tacit priorities. Popularly, the role of corporate corporeality is incidental to the private and ephemeral act of faith proper.
📡 The broadcast body of Christ. The shift to life online reinforces a belief that the body is a mere prop or puppet, a vehicle for the mind. Online church provisions have been not only thin-as-disembodied, but weird, presentationist, slick and shrill ~ alternatively and augmentedly bodied. Somehow, perversely, to the extent that remote-church is being “successful”, it displays that it was not previously more substantial than that which it can so readily simulate.
🦴 Progressively under-bodied. Christendom’s orphan child, Modernity, has inherited this gravely uneasy relationship with bodies - and we are into the fourth and fifth generation of this trajectory. Long deprecating the body leads to touch-avoidance. Touch-avoidance leads to deprecating the body. It is a vicious cycle by which the rituals of touch are forgotten and the choreography of the social dance of bodying together spirals out of sync dangerously - so we blunder blind into one another. The vitality of bodiment is remembered bodily - and so as the body is devalued, so goes the organ for its own memory and so the substance and colour wither away.
🤝 Touch as re-embodying. Touch is a remembering through use, and a remembering through othering and a remembering through expressed worlding. An overt and proactive theology of touch is the counter to the popular noumenal/phenomenal dualism. A counter to that dualism which is begetting and begotten by a solipsistic, disembodied and religiose mode of being towards reality. Touch forces the question of where I end and where you begin. Touch betrays while it also celebrates that I am a body.
6.2 Purposed body-excellence
“..And the child grew and became strong..” Lk2v40
🏋️ Better body. Jesus "grew" and "became strong" ~ like Team America, this needs a montage. The Exploding Calendar trope, set to Eye of the Tiger, we see JC manning up. When we pop out the end of our extended adolescence, what have we become? What manner of manhood have we acquired? Jesus' incarnation involved birth and death, weakness and temptation, family and friendship, hunger and thirst, dirt and cleaning, anger and intellect, physical pain, emotional pain, and in this verse, “growth.” Being human involves a growing into an adult form of the species, quantitatively bigger, and, stronger?
💪 Strength? What did Jesus need strength for? His calling in life was to die for sinners - no strength needed? Additional to that, to preach - no strength needed? And to perform healing - no strength needed? This popular construction of an abridged Jesus in a body-optional mode of his embodiment offers very little to provoke we the reedy, cybernetic and metrosexual towards a muscular Christianity.
🦾 What is your body for? It is tempting to blur a God-is-our-strength sense of dependence with a disembodiment which despises incarnation. I would argue that it is a semiotic absurdity to be singing Hillsong's Stronger while working actively to undermine the excellence of imaging physical strength, hoping to borrow signifiers from elsewhere. Meekness is strength restrained, distinguished from weakness. Jesus carried his cross ~ 135kg. God breaks chains Ac12v7, Ac16v26, Ju16v12, and so should we Is58v6 - wary of which strengths we cultivate for such freedomings.
🤼♂️ Strength is known by touch. As iron is sharpened by iron. Strength is known, and regulated, purposed and calibrated through contact with reality beyond the incurvatus self. How do you measure strength, other than by that which it can resist by the force that it can apply, through contact. We’re on a spectrum, we come as children and finally become frail, and infirm. At a very primary level “..the flesh is weak" and thus must be rested rightly. But, the journey of growth in faith is an enfleshed thing ~ faith without touch is a kind of waking dream, a disembodied belief. To do day time Christianity, we are called to a wide awake faith, muscle and bone faith, a Christianity of the open air. Time is short and today we need all praying hands on deck.
6.3 Embodied epistemologies and teaching the skill of bodying
“..For this reason I remind you to fan into flame the gift of God, which is in you through the laying on of my hands..” 2Ti1v6
🫂 There is power in your body. There is power conveyed in the laying on of hands. What is that power? What is it to know that power in that body? What is it to convey that knowledge of that power to another? How do you give that gift of God? How do we?
[7] Contact-free: Touch is conduit for Reverse Entropy
7.1 Naturally Supernatural
“..And Jesus stretched out his hand and touched him, saying, “I will; be clean.” And immediately his leprosy was cleansed..” Mt8v4
🤝 Jesus touched him. Jesus is the white handkerchief that, when dropped in the ditch, far from becoming polluted, rather turns the ditch clean. The goodness of God at the centre of the universe is an active force. Grace is reverse entropy. He is there and he is not silent, not passive, not static. Supernatural power from the outside is transferred in something so natural as touch.
🤝 Jesus touched him. This Kingdom is attended by a haptic tactile mode of love. Jesus' hands-on touchy feely mode of ministry bears reiteration. We're embodied to embody Kingdom intersubjectivity bodily. So free hugs, so the holding of holding&containing, so the limits of mediated ministry. While we are not saved by phenomenology, we see Jesus saves phenomenologically. Loving thus is no mere touching metaphor.
7.2 Supernaturally Natural
“The body talks to the brain, the brain to the body. The notion that someone’s immune status could be modified by activity in touch-sensitive regions of the brain is not at all crazy. One could certainly imagine a cellular-level explanation for how that would happen.” David Linden via Maria Konnikova - New Yorker
“..Among infected participants, greater perceived support and more-frequent hugs each predicted less-severe illness signs..” Psychological Science (2014)
“We know from the science of what goes on under the skin that when the skin is moved, pressure receptors are stimulated,” she says. This “slows down heart rate, blood pressure and the release of cortisol”, which gives people better control over their stress hormones. Being touched increases the number of natural killer cells, “the frontline of the immune system. Serotonin increases. That’s the body’s natural antidepressant. It enables deeper sleep,”No hugging: are we living through a crisis of touch? - Paula Cocozza - Guardian
🤝 Jesus touched him. It’s a true truth. Touch improves health outcomes generally - but, overcoming barriers to touch is not a natural war against flesh and blood - it is a contention in the heavenly realm. The ministry of laying on hands wars against demonic conspiracies, all sociological apartheids, all class quarantines, all demographic exclusion, all modernist preciousness about isolated platonic solids, all Islamic devotion to hygienic hands, all Foucaultian lock hospitals.
🤝 Jesus touched him. I want to move from Nothing-Touches-Me mode of embodiment, to being better-in-touch, to being, as Jesus, proactively provocative of society's disapproval, available to the invisible classes, carousing with the infectiously poor, associated with sinners, skin to skin. Jesus is not contact-less. Jesus is a counter contagion. Jesus calls Phil to more skin to skin contact with such as these.
[8] Contact-free: Touch as a priority
8.1 Valuing Touch as primary and essential
“..Come and lay your hands on her, so that she may be made well and live..” Mk5v23
“..the centurion replied, “Lord, I am not worthy to have you come under my roof, but only say the word, and my servant will be healed..” Mt8v8
🛫🌱 Air vs Ground. “..lay your hands on her..” can be contrasted with “..only say the word..” - proximity, touch and the body are more Jewish sensitivities while a Roman is perhaps more readily acquainted with imperial verbal edicts - but both are expressions of faith. We do both, somewhat as Mars Hill would speak of an Air War and a Ground War:
“The Air War is the Sunday pulpit and the preaching series that is tied to the pulpit. At Mars Hill, we generally lead our ministry with the Air War of the pulpit. The Ground War works in conjunction with the Air War so that such things as community groups, redemption groups, training classes, biblical counselling etc, coordinates with the preached Word so as to be as effective and unified as possible..”
🥇 Airy Faith. True, there should be a balance of approaches, mediated and direct, virtual and physical, fast church and slow church, the mechanically reproduced and the irreducibly there. But. It is not enough to say we need both, nor even that the two must be coordinated in conjunction. Mars Hill went awry for many documented reasons, perhaps pre-eminently because of its untethered Air War. Eph2v2 puns notwithstanding, an Air War must be secondary to the work of incarnational service.
⛪ Grounded Faith. A church, if it leads with the Air War, either because of the constraints of Covid, or by virtue the broadcast charisma of the pastor - that church will become all brand and no plausibility, it will believe its own hype, and it will become out of touch.
🤝 Ground up. So, with works of faith in an age of mechanical reproduction - Touch must be the regulating principle for everything, and as such, much come first.
8.2 Championing Touch for others
“..Then children were brought to him that he might lay his hands on them and pray. The disciples rebuked the people, but Jesus said, “Let the little children come to me and do not hinder them, for to such belongs the kingdom of heaven.”..” Mt19v13-14
“..He touched her hand, and the fever left her, and she rose and began to serve him. That evening they brought to him many who were oppressed by demons, and he cast out the spirits with a word and healed all who were sick..” Mt8v15-16
🤝 Reciprocal tactility. Observe that the response to encountering Jesus, is bringing others to be touched by him. Commending touch and bringing others to touch encounters.
🤝 Touched to serve. “..began to serve him..” After Covid, my present and future feverlessness is purposed for such service, all of life is a gift of opportunity to serve in grateful overflow. Am I serving?
🤝 Serve to touch. “..they brought to him many..” Who are my many - am I, do I? So, this season of prayerfulness should seek rightly motivated to bring many sick to him in prayer, in person, in earnest.
[9] Contact-free: For the Love of Touch
“..And Jesus said, “Who was it that touched me?”..” Lk8v45
“..This is more like an innate need to be constantly surrounded by a mass of golden retriever puppies, the need to constantly stand in the crash of an ocean, or the need to feel breeze on your arms. It’s about aching when you read verses about John resting his head on Christ’s chest..”A Few Awkward Thoughts on the Love Language of Physical Touch - Rebecca Reynolds
🧑🤝🧑 I&Thou. Touch involves me and you, a specific I and a specific thou. Jesus asks ‘Who?’ because that identity matters. Thandi, as a kitten, little fur bundle of metaphors, at that point yet untouchable, would sit on the table opposite, fixated on my mousey typing hands, alarmed occasionally to discover that they belonged to the head at the top of the dressing gown. In this way, the Hand of Rob (35:52-42:24) that passes through our reality, would do so mysteriously, but actually in search of relationship, who to whom, whole person to whole person.
“..But Jesus said, “Someone touched me, for I perceive that power has gone out from me.”..” Lk8v46
⚡ The Power of Love. The Dr Gary Chapman makes Touch one fifth of his Love Languages - different folks, different strokes ~ however you are gifted to give and receive, Jesus meets you there. Touch is a peculiar one though. Gifts, service, even words can be ninja'd. Touch, less so. As a tango takes two, so touch is a mutual embrace of two charged nodes. Touch conducts electric power. Power has a purpose ~ to light the room - so be motivated to learn to touch for the sake of light. But equally, electricity doesn’t need abuse of power for its power to demand right protection. The power of love demands we learn to touch for the sake of safety.
⚡ The Love of Power. I have some reservations about Love Languagising love. I am reconciled to the descriptive but wary of the prescriptive. Descriptively, identifying my own primary modes of giving and receiving love is a healthy self-knowledge with which to plumb the origins of my mysterious predilections. Prescriptively a formulafication of love leads to transactionalisations of activity without sacrifice and robotic interactions utilised to make love happen by taking power over.
⚡ Power to the people. See Jesus knows power had gone out of him: its power under, if anything. Power made available, free sockets in a cafe, power to be free-loaded, by touch. So, power up, to let power out, be charged up, and be contactable.
“..If you live with others, you should do all of the above, and also: Give a real hug. Spell out the word E-N-D-O-R-P-H-I-N in your head while you hug tightly, or count to nine. That’s about the time it takes for the effects of being hugged to happen. If you never hug your roommates, now’s the time to start— and not just the one you like best, hug ‘em all..”Lore Ferguson Wilbert - Self Touch During Covid-19
“..My last hug, I suspect, was when I parted from my friend Hannah on March 7. I don’t remember it because I didn’t know its significance at the time — if I had, Hannah might have been squeezed to death..” Hattie Crisell - When will I be hugged again?
🤝 Find a way to touch. Jesus came and comes as close as breathing, as near as hands and feet. Before baby Jesus had words he had a body. He set about touching, go and do likewise - so many of your friends are at the point of death, so many of them exist in the pathological touchlessness of Web 2.0, so many of them would be transformed if you would lay hands on them.
[10] Contact-free: Don’t deprive one another except..
“..Do not deprive one another, except perhaps by agreement for a limited time, that you may devote yourselves to prayer; but then come together again, so that Satan may not tempt you because of your lack of self-control..” 1Co7v5
“..I will not kill off my yearning to touch you. I will let it guide me. I will fantasise about it. I will write about it. I will draw it. I will remember us cuddling in January, mad dancing in the protest last July. I will feel the soft skin of your precious hand in mine. I will embrace you as you cry and cherish the wetness of your tears on my blouse. I will feel the fire of rage in my belly and the impossible sorrow in my throat. And I will learn over time how to translate this hunger for your body, for your burning skin, into the making of this most necessary new world..” Touch saved me from loneliness - V (formerly Eve Ensler) - Guardian
🤝 Addiction to hands and feet? What would it be to have an addiction to hands and feet.. What are the withdrawal symptoms? Lockdown has many of us going straight edge, teetotal by default. What would it be to redeem the experience of lack? How to make an imposed restriction into an elective spiritual sacrifice?
🤝 Fasting touch. Never heard a sermon on this. What does devoting yourself to prayer look like in this season? What wordless groans and tongues substitute for being in touch? How to pray, how to lament, how to fast, how to deprive and so heighten and refine our theology of touch when we can come together again?