BBC Radio 4: Thought for the day - 13 April 2021

The following is a transcript, but you can listen to the BBC website here.

Good morning,

This week, many people will be celebrating a long-awaited trip to the hairdressers or barbers, or to have their nails done. Much more significantly - for some of them this may be their first physical human contact for over a year.

The coronavirus pandemic has starved many of physical touch. Although it’s also got rid of the awkwardness of having to decide how to greet someone: one kiss or two, a handshake or an embrace?

Nevertheless, many will be longing to sit in the hairdressers’ chair again, and feel the intimate and soothing familiarity of human contact.

As humans, physical contact isn’t just a nice-to-have. It’s a necessity; a need that is vital at key moments in our lives – from birth to death.

I was moved to tears when I saw on social media a photo depicting a harrowing yet beautiful image. Nurses in a Brazilian covid isolation ward had created what has been described as ‘the hand of God’ – two disposable gloves tied, full of hot water, simulating human contact, to bring comfort to patients separated from their family members in their final hours of life.

There is something disturbing about the image – how can a warm rubber glove take the place of a loved one’s hand as someone takes their final breaths? But it certainly reminds us of how important it is for us to be touched, held, embraced – especially in our darkest moments.

The rubber-gloved hand of God reminds us of what has been taken from us during this pandemic.

Many scientific experiments have been done which demonstrate the importance of human touch to child development. Children in Romanian orphanages in the 1980s grew up with physical and mental delay in part due to the lack of basic human touch they received, while 13th century historian Salimbene described the tragic consequences of an experiment on babies in isolation, which led to many of them dying. “They could not live without the caresses,” he said.

I myself remember the agony of not being able to hold my baby boy for hours on end as he received treatment during his first few days of life.

At the heart of the Christian story is this idea that God moves from the ethereal and immaterial, to the physical. The incarnation – God becoming human just like us in the form of Christ – is able to touch and to be touched. He is not a disembodied ghost.

The gospel accounts show Jesus’s willingness to bring healing, comfort and acceptance through touch: embracing a man with leprosy, long shunned by the rest of society; touching the eyes of the blind and bringing sight.

God is with us in the incarnation, in the magic of a hairdressers’ fingers and the beautifying touch of a manicurist’s hand. As Michaelangelo said: “To touch can be to give life.”