The Untouchables

Recently, I was having a conversation with a fellow clergyman about that perennially controversial liturgical action, the Peace. I mentioned that I preferred the approach of my former college, where each of us exchanged a somewhat stylised embrace with our near neighbours, rather than shaking hands. I prefer it for two reasons: firstly, because it is a liturgical action, a continuation and extension of what is happening at the altar, rather than a break in it. But secondly, we hugged each other because we genuinely felt we were a community, even a family – albeit a sometimes dysfunctional one. A handshake, by contrast, is the greeting between strangers who have just been introduced.

My interlocutor laughed, as people tend to do when I suggest that anything I learned at college might be relevant or applicable in the parish, and said “Soon you won’t be able to hug anyone. Dave Lee Travis has seen to that!”

It was a throwaway comment, but one that horrified me. Are we reaching a point when human touch – the incarnate expression of our relationship with one another – becomes inherently suspect? Linguistically, we already have. I remember a training day at my old workplace where we had to select from a list behaviours which were not appropriate, and several picked “touching”. We had to be reminded that “touching” can have a perfectly innocent meaning. And I think you can imagine the amused horror when a friend at college found a book on children’s ministry, entitled “Touching the future”!

I’ve recently noticed a practice, both at my church and elsewhere, of priests blessing children by laying their hand on the child’s shoulder rather than their head (I’ve even seen somewhere a warning that a hand on the head could inadvertently take the child’s eye out… I think we’ll file that with the time a teacher told me to stop chewing my hair lest I die of hairballs.) It’s still touch, of course, so we have not entirely lost that sense of the sacramental and incarnational value of human contact. But the laying on of hands on the head is an ancient tradition going right back to the Bible. A hand on the shoulder is more like a sports coach about to pronounce a moving platitude in a coming-of-age movie. It’s right there with the handshake and the backslap as repressed English male affection.

If we shy away from touch, what are we actually telling our children? That bodily contact is scary? That *they* are scary? In cultures where men are not permitted to touch or look at women, the implication is that the women are the problem – they are too dangerous to be seen or touched. Is that the attitude to our bodies we want to grow up with?

I’m not suggesting we should go around inflicting uninvited hugs on newcomers to church – that did happen to me once, complete with badly-aimed air kiss that landed on my ear, and I can’t say it particularly made me feel at peace with the individual concerned. I am English and I have English ideas of personal space. Yet it seems there is a tension when we talk about the church in terms of the imagery of the body, yet are fearful of the bodies of our fellow Christians. Should our behaviour be determined by the worst that human beings do to one another, or should it affirm and reclaim that which is good?

The evensong readings this week have told the tale of Creation and the Fall. “Who told you you were naked?” God asks. Who taught you to be ashamed of your bodies? We can’t ignore the fact that we are fallen, and our physical relationships are open to sin and distortion – the kingdom cannot be a return to the naivite of our first paradise but the hope of a new creation. Yet they are also open to redemption and transfiguration. The challenge for the church must be to live in that tension – not to ignore fallenness, or to fail to protect people from its consequences, but to model the hope of something better.