Touch

This article from a blog I follow really spoke to me this morning. The author is Bishop David Kendall.

“Keep in touch,” we say when friends part ways. “Touch” via phone, mail, and literal, physical touch assures continuing relationship. No longer to touch or somehow to become “untouchable” signals the death of relationship, and perhaps death period. Ask an infant who starves or fails to thrive in the absence of touch. Ask young lovers, or old lovers, whose hearts chill and harden without touch. Ask the disgraced or diseased whose hope and help dissolve apart from touch. How vital touch is. The DNA simply requires it! And, at Christmas time, in the deepest ways, God began to give it. God reached out to touch us. In the intimacy of a virgin’s womb, in the flailing of tiny manger-held arms and legs, in the squeeze of mommy’s finger, in the embrace of daddy’s neck—TOUCH—in the hollow sockets of blind eyes, in the weakness of lame legs, in the frenzy of demon torment, in the emptiness of hunger, in the brokenness of betrayal, in the stinging of the lash, in the shock of flesh-driven spikes, in the gasps of death throes—TOUCH. The touch of God—loving, healing, saving. Now, we have been touched in order to touch. Let the touch of God be shared with all, especially the “untouchables” within reach!

http://fmcna.typepad.com/david_kendall/2010/01/the-touch-of-god.html