READING
Mark 1: 21, 22, 39 & Mark 2:1-12 [Jesus Seminar Translation]
Then they come to Capernaum, and on the Sabbath day he went right to the synagogue and started teaching. They were astonished at his teaching, since he would teach them on his own authority, unlike the scholars…
So he went all around Galilee speaking in their synagogues and driving out demons…
Some days later he went back to Capernaum and was rumored to be at home. And many people crowded around so there was no longer any room, even outside the door. Then he started speaking to them. Some people then show up with a paralytic being carried by four of them. And when they were not able to get near him on account of the crowd, they removed the roof above him. After digging it out, they lowered the mat on which the paralytic was lying. When Jesus noticed their trust, he says to the paralytic, “Child, your sins are forgiven.”
Some of the scholars were sitting there and silently wondering: “Why does that fellow say such things? He’s blaspheming! Who can forgive sins except the one God?”
And right away, because Jesus sensed in his spirit that they were raising questions like this among themselves, he says to them: “Why do you entertain questions about these things? Which is easier, to say to the paralytic, ‘Your sins are forgiven.’ Or to say, ‘Get up, pick up your mat and walk’?” But so that you may realize that on earth the son of Adam has authority to forgive sins, he says to the paralytic, “You there, get up, pick up your mat and go home!”
And he got up, picked his mat right up, and walked out as everyone looked on. So they all became ecstatic, extolled God, and exclaimed, “We’ve never seen the likes of this!”
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, by Jean-Dominique Bauby, p 4ff
As our third sermon in this year’s Lenten Sermon Series let’s investigate the sense of touch and its connection to meaning through the witness of someone who has lost the capacity to touch. Touching often is a voluntary and willful movement of a person to contact and connect with things and other people. Often touch involves our reaching out to do so. Former editor of Elle magazine, Jean-Dominique Bauby tells of the situation in which he finds himself, incapable of reaching out and touching things and people differentiated from the self:
… In the past, it was known as a “massive stroke,” and you simply died. But improved resuscitation techniques have now prolonged and refined the agony. You survive, but you survive with what is so aptly known as “locked-in syndrome.” Paralyzed from head to toe, the patient, his mind intact, is imprisoned inside his own body, unable to speak or move. In my case blinking my left eyelid is my only means of communication…
An ordinary day. At seven the chapel bells begin again to punctuate the passage of time, quarter hour by quarter hour. After their night’s respite, my congested bronchial tubes once more begin their noisy rattle. My hands, lying curled on the yellow sheets, are hurting, although I can’t tell if they are burning hot or ice cold. To fight off stiffness, I instinctively stretch, my arms and legs moving only a fraction of an inch. It is often enough to bring relief to a painful limb.
My diving bell become less oppressive, and my mind takes flight like a butterfly. There is so much to do. You can wander off in space or in time, set out for Tierra del Fuego or for King Midas’ court.
You can visit the woman you love, slide down beside her and stroke her still-sleeping face…
Enough rambling. My main task now is to compose the first of these bedridden travel notes so that I shall be ready when my publisher’s emissary arrives to take my dictation, letter by letter.
SERMON
We live in a time and a culture that indulges in and worships excess.
We live in a time and culture where every one of our senses is invigorated almost every moment. And we live in a time and culture where common sense has come to mean if senses are invigorated for delight and meaning, then invigorating them to excess will bring more delight and meaning. If empathizing with the suffering Christ is your spiritual practice, then marching single file into a movie house to be bombarded with a visual of blood, dismemberment, flesh torn from flesh suffering, in slow motion, for two excessive hours, will somehow lead you to an abundance of empathy that can’t help but redeem you? As you all know I am referring to the movie, The Dawn of the Dead.
So, let’s take another path. This Lenten Sermon Series has been an attempt to clear away another path. Not the path forged by the opposite of sensual excess, the path of abstinence or scarcity, privation, neglect, or want of our senses. Not the path that turns off the senses in a time and culture of sensual excess, but truly another path.
In fact liberal theology struck out on its own, away from orthodoxy, over just such a prospect, the one of another path. Late nineteenth century German theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher, the “Father of Liberal Theology,” identified feeling as the highway that connects human being to God; not church doctrine, not believing rightly, morally, or ethically. We feel a deep unity to existence in moments of grace and profundity experienced. All kinds of different experiences can elicit this feeling. Who has not had an overwhelming sense of their oneness with existence either at night looking at the stars, at the beach hearing the rhythm of the waves, at home tasting the fellowship of family around the Thanksgiving table, on a farmer’s land smelling newly mown hay, or reaching out and softly stroking the face of the one we love? Reaching out and touching the one we love. It is the feeling engendered by sense that is the source of all the religious beliefs, theologies, moral and ethical pronouncements we make because experience is most basic and prior to them all. Jesus’ experience and an individual watching a movie are two distinct experiences with two distinct meanings for two distinct individuals.
So, let’s continue to forge this other path.
“Reach out and touch someone” advises a telephone advertisement as if talking on the phone or sending an email substitutes for the power of human touch. I say power because like the sound of a voice or the force of words received, touch conveys energy. It conveys energy in the most intimate of all ways and, thus, becomes a most mysterious form of power conveyance. There is nothing magical about touch but it is mysterious. A mother can gently place her lips upon the skinned knee of her young child, and although we know there is no medicinal value in a mother’s lips, the child feels better. Regardless of age being held conveys and means something very basic. There is something to the phrase “healing touch.” I know skilled doctors that have it and skilled doctors that don’t, but few unskilled doctors that do. My mother-in-law has the healing touch as a nurse. She’s a highly sensitive and skilled nurse, but the healing touch is more than these. It is a deeply profound form of communication, a basic form of connection between a person in need of something and a person that provides that something that is needed. It’s mysterious and generates a mysterious bond, but it is not magical.
Jean-Dominique Bauby tells of when his situation creates a moment of mirth in his mind that lapses into a vision of imaginative power that without willful touch cannot come true:
In the main hall of the hospital, a vast echoing space in which gurneys and wheelchairs can advance five abreast, a stained-glass window depicts the wife of Napoleon III, the hospital’s patroness [Empress Eugenie]… There comes a time when the heaping up of calamities brings on uncontrollable nervous laughter – when, after a final blow from fate, we decide to treat it all as a joke. My jovial cackling at first disconcerted Eugenie, until she herself was infected by my mirth. We laughed until we cried. The municipal band then struck up a waltz, and I was so merry that I would willingly have risen and invited Eugenie [out of the stained-glass window] to dance, had such a move been fitting. We would have whirled around miles of floor. Even since then, whenever I go through the main hall, I detect a hint of amusement in the empress’s smile [in that stain-glass window]. (25)
The one who cannot or struggles to reach out and touch someone else is a peculiar kind of paralytic, imprisoned in disconnection and isolation. Bauby lives within his mind and calls this abode “the diving bell” because of its confines. To touch can be to become connected in a peculiar and willful way to something outside the self. It is not like the “meeting of the minds,” or the spiritual discovery of a soul mate, and not the look of love or catching the delightful cooing of one’s offspring. To touch another person is to be willfully connected with them and to establish and share in a bond, a dancing covenant regarding destiny. It’s why inappropriate touch is such a powerful betrayal. It’s not like saying or hearing something that is false or tasting something foul. Through touch the life of another is, however little or greatly, intertwined with yours and touch is all of the transmitter, the creator, and the symbol of this deep bond. Perhaps the prominence and proliferation of sexual display in our culture is evidence of our human longing for an experience of the kind of deep connection and meaning touch conveys and creates, and the fear of being incapable of it.
Without touch Bauby can still see and describes the landscape of his everyday existence in the hospital room:
I can now turn my head ninety degrees, and my field of vision extends from the slate roof of the building next door to the curious tongue-lolling Mickey Mouse drawn by my son, The, when I was still able to open my mouth. (16)
Without touch Bauby can still hear.
My right ear is completely bocked, and my left ear amplifies and distorts all sounds farther than ten feet away. [I hear the never ceasing,] continuous racket that assails me from the corridor whenever they forget to shut my door despite all my efforts to alert people to my hearing problems. (95)
Without touch Bauby can still communicate, in that he wrote his memoir by “speaking” words by blinking his eyelid to his secretary when she correctly identified the letter that was part of the word, sentence, paragraph, chapter and book he was writing. And he still can smell.
I never tire of the smell of French fries. (88)
He cannot fully taste because he cannot swallow, yet does get a small part of taste, nourishment, through a feeding tube. And this he laments, perhaps because taste is closest to touch in being different than the other senses. Maybe it is because sight, sound, and smell involve waves emitted by the objects of our world, and taste and touch are our most immediate access to that world. Existence becomes cold and hot, sharp and smooth, hard and soft through touch. We venture outside the confines of the self through touch, and find harm and healing in our world. While an infant touches only to explore the world, a basic trust and faith in creation is built up not through sight, sound, smell, or taste, but primarily through being held. It is the way both trust and faith are initiated.
[My physical therapist Brigitte] ends [our sessions] with a facial massage. Her warm fingers travel all over my face, including the numb zone, which seems to me to have the texture of parchment, and the area that still has feeling, where I can manage the beginnings of a frown. Since the demarcation line runs across my mouth, I can only half-smile, which fairly faithfully reflects my ups and downs. A domestic event as commonplace as washing can trigger the most varied emotions.
… And my weekly bath plunges me simultaneously into distress and happiness. The delectable moment when I sink into the tub is quickly followed by nostalgia for the protracted immersions there were the joy of my previous life. Armed with a cup of tea or a Scotch, a good book or a pile of newspapers, I would soak for hours, maneuverings the taps with my toes. Rarely do I feel my condition so cruelly as when I am recalling such pleasures. (16-17)
Trust, faith, belief, the joy and capacity to enjoy existence travel through touch. And when we touch someone else it becomes a pre-verbal, pre-cognitive connection and bond that is the most intimate thread that can be established between two distinct individual selves. It’s part of why Bauby feels a guilty pleasure when he is being cleaned up. Like an infant he cannot return the touch, completing the bond initiated and establishes by touch.
One day, for example, I can find it amusing, in my 45th year, to be cleaned up and turned over, to have my bottom wiped and swaddled like a newborn’s. I even derive a guilty pleasure from this total lapse into infancy… But the next day, the same procedure seems to me unbearably sad… (17)
By giving and receiving touch our lives become intertwined with others. Reciprocal touch can complete a bond of destiny whereby our individual life implies the destiny of other lives. Our life spiritually implies all of human life. Yet, even in the midst of the bond and covenant touch completes between two persons, there remains a separation, a differentiation. While people can claim to have heard God, spoken the word of God, see God’s work in the world, smell God’s fragrance in the incense or taste God in the communion wafer, no one has ever claimed to have touched God although there are some who claim to have been themselves been “touched by an angel” or by God. In other words, while most can be touched and touch in return, and establish this deepest of all connections, there is a deeper connection still that cannot be overcome physically or materially, but spiritually. We may be touched by God but no one can touch God in reciprocity and return. Bauby’s incapacity reveals this ultimate separation that really has nothing to do with the condition of our bodies but the condition of our spirit. Is it okay or is there a break or breach, redemptive or in need of being redeemed, healed or broken? How can we spiritually touch God and bridge an ultimate separation?
The last time I saw my father, I shaved him. It was the week [before] my stroke…
I wrap a big towel around his shriveled neck, daub thick lather over his face, and do my best not to irritate his skin, doted here and there with small dilated capillaries…
I complete my barber’s duties by splashing my father with his favorite aftershave lotion. Then we say goodbye… We have not seen each other since. I cannot quit my seaside [hospital] confinement. And he can no longer descend the magnificent staircase of his apartment building on his 92 year-old legs. We are both locked-in cases, each in his own way; myself in my carcass, my father in his 4th floor apartment. Now I am the one they shave every morning… I hope that [with my father] I was a more attentive Figaro. (45)
One without the capacity to touch knows this ultimate separation, a deeper separation of the spirit that requires something deeper than touch to repair. When we can reach out and touch someone else in love, however broken the spirit it is healed. But for this ultimate separation something more than touch is needed. Bauby plays the word communication game “Hangman” with his young son through his mind, and stumbles upon a part of his existence that has deeper meaning, perhaps ultimate meaning, in what he can remember and the touch, the communication and conveyance of power and the establishing of a bond, which he no longer can do physically:
But we can certainly play hangman, the national preteen sport. I guess a letter, then another, then stumble on the third. My heart is not I the game. Grief surges over me. His face not two feet from mine, my son Theo sits patiently waiting – and I, his father, have lost the simple right to ruffle his bristly hair, clasp his downy neck, hug his small, lithe, warm body tight against me. There are no words to express it. My condition is monstrous, iniquitous, revolting, horrible. Suddenly I can take no more. Tears well and my throat emits a hoarse rattle that startles Theo. Don’t be scared, little man. I love you. Still engrossed in the game, he moves in for the kill. Two more letters: he has won and I have lost. On a corner of the page he completes his drawing of the gallows, the rope, and the condemned man.
-pp 71-72
Without touch he cannot convey love in the most elemental way. With touch, the deepest kind of love, a love that heals the spirit, can be given.
The stories of Jesus’ healing touch are so easy for us to misunderstand. He did not and could not offer his hand to touch the hand of someone like Jean-Dominique Bauby to escort him out of the diving bell. No one who has yet walked the earth has that kind of authority. It is the difference between cure and healing. The first involves the workings of the body, that intricate mechanism that is contained from our skin to the inside. Bauby cannot be cured of his diving bell. But that is not what touch can do. Touch can heal or harm. And healing has to do with the spirit, with the connection between us inside and all things outside our diving bell, and from which we are separated. Healing is about us and existence, and touch is the thread that connects the two for harm or healing. Touch symbolizes the reality of a covenant between the individual and existence, a bond that connects the self with the world that the individual occupies and shapes. The body may be well or sick, but healing, like touch, has to do with our most elemental bond to existence. It has to do with a spiritual bond that may need adjustment. We may be able to touch people and the things of the world, and yet be imprisoned in the most horrid of paralysis. Many are those who die, confined in spirit long before the body gives out, and that is the most agonizing death of all!
And forgiveness is the spiritual form of a “touch” that completes the connection that makes humanity whole. But it is a spiritual touch that requires one human being to reach out in forgiveness to others. Touch symbolizes that as human beings our lives intertwine and imply the lives of others. But as we are mortal and finite, this bond will be transgressed and betrayed, trespassed upon by human weakness and deceit. We will break the bonds that we have established with one another as surely as two lovers will eventually let go of one another’s hand. We will even break the bonds that tie us to our deepest selves and to the meaning of creation. This is the deeper, spiritual meaning of the story of Jesus’ healing the paralytic. It is easier to say to a paralytic, “Rise up and walk,” than it is to say to others, “Forgive me” or to say to the self, “I am forgiven” or to say to God, “Please forgive me or forgive them for they know not what they do.” It is easier to say to a paralytic, “Rise up and walk,” because to believe that the request, “Forgive me,” reestablishes deep bonds is to realize what we too often run away from: That the authority is ours. The authority to create loving relationships and a world of loving bonds is ours. I shake your hand, put my hand on your shoulder, hug you, and our destinies become one, and thus, through simple touch our deep connections as human beings are recognized. We will be transgressed as surely as we are mortal. And it is within our authority to re-establish them, bring God’s love our of hiding and into existence, through the spiritual touch of forgiveness.
For Jesus surely stroked the cheek of the paralytic and massaged his hair, and maybe took his hand and placed it upon his own lips as symbolic of the spiritual touch that heals the spirit: “Child your sins are forgiven.”
AMEN.