Skin needs to be touched to heal

By FR. RON ROLHEISER, omi
Rome

One day her grandmother assessed her and pronounced a more ancient and accurate diagnosis: "Skin needs to be touched!"

Her grandmother then began to give her regular skin massages and these did what the more sophisticated medicines couldn't do. They cured her.

Peterson's grandmother is right: Skin needs to be touched!

God knows that better than anyone. It's why Jesus gave us the Eucharist. In the Eucharist, skin gets touched. The Eucharist isn't abstract, a theological instruction, a creed, a moral precept or even just an intimate word. It's bodily, an embrace, a kiss, the real presence in a deeper way than even the old metaphysics imagined.

We tend to shy away from admitting how radically physical the Eucharist actually is. St. Paul didn't share that fear. For him, the physical communion that takes place in the Eucharist, between us and Christ as well as among ourselves, is as real and radical as sexual union.

The early Church understood the Eucharist as so real, so physical, and so intimate, they surrounded it with the taboos of privacy, reverence and reticence we reserve for sexual intimacy.

The intent of the discipline was not to create a mystique around the Eucharist so as to draw people to it through curiosity.

The opposite.

The idea was more that the Eucharist is so intimate an act that propriety, respect and reverence demand non-exhibitionism: you don't make love in public and you don't talk to outsiders about this kind of intimacy.

We tend to shy away from that kind of talk. Partly that's understandable. It's hard to be comfortable religiously with how Christianity understands the physical and the bodily. Christianity is the most earthy of all religions. It doesn't call you out of the physical, out of the body or out of the world. Rather Christ enters the physical, becomes one with it, blesses it, redeems it and tells us that there is no reason to escape from it.

Something in that goes against the grain. Christ's relationship to the physical scandalized his contemporaries ("This is intolerable language!" is what the crowds said when Jesus spoke of the physical character of the Eucharist in John's Gospel) and is still hard for us to accept today. But it's a wonderful part of Christianity. In the Eucharist, our skin gets touched.

And, given all our tensions, we need that touch, frequently, daily even. The late essayist and novelist, Andre Dubus, once wrote why he went to Eucharist regularly, despite the critical circles he moved in: "This morning I received the sacrament I still believe in: at seven-fifteen the priest elevated the host, then the chalice, and spoke the words of the ritual, and the bread became flesh, the wine became blood, and minutes later I placed on my tongue the taste of forgiveness and of love that affirmed, perhaps celebrated, my being alive, my being mortal.

"This has nothing to do with immortality, with eternity; I love the earth too much to contemplate a life apart from it, although I believe in that life.

"No, this has to do with mortality and the touch of flesh, and my belief in the sacrament of the Eucharist is simple: without touch, God is a monologue, an idea, a philosophy; he must touch and be touched, the tongue on flesh, and that touch is the result of the monologues, the idea, the philosophies which led to faith; but in the instant of the touch there is no place for thinking, for talking, the silent touch affirms all that, and goes deeper: it affirms the mysteries of love and mortality."

Skin heals when touched. It's why Jesus gave us the Eucharist.

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