Touch is a, well, touchy subject these days. It conjures the human contact that pandemic rendered dangerous, and that we miss increasingly.

Though virtual communication emphasizes how many ways we interact, we’ve learned how much we count on connecting through touch. Deeply embedded in our metaphors, such touch signals our response to something outside ourselves: We’re “touched” by things experienced. We also, as above, call something outside that bothers us “touchy.”

Touch, I’ve known, shapes our consciousness and engagement with the world, albeit with dangers and partnerships. So here are some thoughts surrounding specifically connective touch.

Touch forms part of our Being as “enfleshed” mortals. Exercised through our entire body (hugs, walking barefoot on moss), its most familiar “agent” is our skin, our largest organ and our body’s frame or border; with it we feel, learn. Touch is thus crucial, as thinker Gabriel Josipovici argued in his wonderful book Touch, for exploring our selves and our relationship with others and the outside world.  

Touch confirms HERENESS, for many philosophers and scientists more truthfully than sight, our most vaunted faculty.

Touch consequently bonds us powerfully. We’ve long used connective touch as an instrument of social power. Take healing hands. Many communities over time have practiced healing touch; Jesus’ compassionate approach became a mandate to followers down to us.

Yet connective touch is double-edged. Touch can violate the sacred for many. The touch of the powerful can victimize, as today’s heartrending sexual abuse reports emphasize.

For me, one biblical “don’t touch” case highlights the humanness of connective touch: Jesus’ encounter with Mary Magdalene after he rose from the dead (John 20:11-17).

Jesus prevented Mary from touching him in her joyful belief that he’d returned as promised. The Latin Vulgate gives his response as “touch me not [noli me tangere].” However the original Greek led many, credibly I think, to argue that he meant “STOP CLINGING.” The resurrected Jesus thus indicated that, though he was still in human (albeit changed) form marked by his fatal ordeal, he was transitioning to metaphysical divinity. Yet he was not the untouchable sacred, since he then invited his doubting disciple Thomas to probe his wounds to prove his resurrection. Mary Magdalene sought to interact as she knew how, human-to-human, prompting Jesus to urge her to let go of his embodied self as he rejoined their immortal family to prepare for the next chapters for all.

When we “let go” for pandemic, we were moved to reconnect in other ways, allying other senses, mind, and creativity. Connective touch honors our hereness, our powerful means to engage at close range responsibly with our physical community and world, to choose when to hold back, and to appreciate alternatives. We’re evolving new combinations of virtual and here, with mixed feelings. I miss hugging friends and am Zoomed-out, but voices and virtual presence touch me as never before. 

— Suzanne Glover Lindsay, St. Stephen’s historian and curator