We touch ourselves and touch others, and so define the limits of our accessibility and our identity.

Later on, cultural sanctions will intrude, and make us overly rigid about whom to touch, or who touches us. India has the unfortunate history of relegating a whole class of people as unclean, and so “untouchable.”

And much later, we will distinguish between the ‘feel of things’: the rough male touch: quick, brusque, confident — pushing, tearing, slamming, grappling, intruding; the gentle female touch: hesitant, self-conscious, protective — mending, cleaning, molding, enclosing within.

How variegated the experience of touching! Precision touches, as on computers, watch springs, scalpels, and high fashion. Violent touches, as in the thud of machinery and the cranking of gears, the shudder of the axe, the recoil of a bullet. Playful touches, kisses and caresses, pinches and squeezes, hugs and massages which bring us physical pleasure.

Human touches are many and varied, as are indeed the human ways of knowing.

This emphasis on the visual in our present day — whether through the printed page, the computer screen, or the TV set — is fairly recent in human history, and probably also an impoverishment.

For vision, as the philosopher said, is a “fractioning sense,” which is to say, we see only one side of a thing at a time. (If I’m looking at your face, I cannot see your back at the same time, in spite of multiple cameras.)

Even more, vision scans surfaces, but doesn’t go beyond. My gaze at your face doesn’t tell me much about what goes on within your mind unless you speak to me — or let me touch you.

Knowledge comes from seeing, so thought the ancient Greeks. No, challenged the ancient Hebrews, knowledge comes from hearing. Or more accurately, not just from hearing, but from touching, smelling, tasting — the whole sensory spectrum.

To know is to touch, to enclose, to cling to — a metaphor for sexual intimacy. But not just the Hebrews, all ancient ‘knew’ in the same way, and relics of popular expressions still remind us how close ‘to know’ and ‘to touch’ used to be — I know it “like the back of my hand,” “like the inside of my pocket,” “at his fingertips,” “on the tip of my tongue”. To be “out of touch” is not to know.

The world of the New Testament is like that. It’s pushing, shoving, grasping, kicking milieu (like much of the Third World today?) where bread is broken and shared by disciples with unwashed hands, where wine is slurped out of a common mug, where crowds hem Jesus in and tugged at the edge of his garment, where Jesus blesses lepers, fondles children, applies spittle to a blind man’s eyes and thrusts his fingers into a deaf man’s ears, where the afterlife is not some eternal “beatific vision” (does multi-channel color TV seem that way already?) but a boisterous wedding feast where the “last” gatecrash their way in,  and where the drinking, dancing, singing and flirting seem to go on non-stop.

This is the world of the senses, the world of feeling and touch, known and savored by our ancestors, but largely lost today.

Touching may be intrusive and aggressive, or comforting and healing, but it gives a sense of proportion and security to a world that increasingly relies on visuals that overwhelm, and thus skims the surface but lacks depth.

We are always hesitant to reach out and touch a strange object (“What if it bites!”) but having mastered this initial fear, touch may well become a form of closure, wherein love and nurturing can find a space.

In this sense then, “to lay hands upon” is an epiclesis, a calling down of the Spirit who gives life and energy.

The next time you ask someone to “stay in touch,” give him or her a hug. Show that you mean it.

*The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official editorial position of UCA News.