One hundred and seventy years ago, in 1833, Dr. Charles
Bell, the Scottish surgeon whose name comes down to us as the Bell in “Bell’s
palsy,” wrote a book specifically commissioned to employ the human hand as
proof of the existence of God. I came across
the book a few years ago, the small, beautifully illustrated Treatise number IV
of The Bridgewater Treatises: On the
Power, Wisdom, and Goodness of God as Manifested in the Creation. Don’t
worry, now. I do not intend to defend
Much in our experience teaches us to be “talking heads,”
alienated from the flesh and bone and organs and muscles that hold us up. As
Tom Owen-Towle reminds us in our Opening Words, our
use of our hands is complicated by cultural conventions regarding personal
boundaries and touch, by our history with our own bodies and the ethics of
touch in our families of origin, by Safe Congregations and anti-harassment
guidelines, and by hair-raising stories in our homes and in the news regarding
touch and the dynamics of power and abuse. Yet, I bring to you this morning
what I believe to be a vital
corollary of Bells’ and
With that introduction, a heads up on what is to come. I want to share with you three ideas about hands. These three sections will be divided by short periods of meditation beginning and ending with a bell. The meditations consist of three story vignettes in diverse voices punctuated by brief silences. You might want, during these meditative intervals, to examine and appreciate your own unique and storied hands.
[chime]
*
A woman holds an infant, chest to chest, one hand cradling his head. His body is nearly invisible, lost behind her
other hand and arm. She can feel the
quick beating of his tiny fierce heart in the palm of her hand.
* Finally unafraid, a young man cradles his dying partner’s beloved hand in his own, understanding at last that commitment is simply one hand in another: at the beginning, and through to the end.
* I loved to watch my grandmother’s hands working the living dough. She worked it like she worked us—with abundant love and patience—stirring in wholesomeness; stirring until the mix became too thick to move with a big wooden spoon; strengthening the dough in the long kneading; keeping it warm for the slow miraculous rising. We feed our own with her wisdom.
[chime]
Praying hands. On the route to everywhere we traveled locally in the southern Appalachian town in which I lived as a child, we passed split-level ranch homes (in vogue at that time) with big picture windows facing the road. On the sill in the middle of those windows, on our side of the closed curtains, often—not always, but often—
stood a “praying hands” sculpture. You know the sort: ceramic hands palm to palm,
like a steeple, cut off at the wrist and mounted on a base. “Whose hands?” I used to wonder. “Why hands?” I wonder still. Why hands with no body attached? But then I think of the small obsessions with hands in my own childhood. My hands told my story. At school tracings on paper of our splayed hands became Thanksgiving turkeys. I had pianist’s hands, artist’s hands—long, slim fingers and an amazing span. I remember making glue casts of the complicated and intriguing surface of my fingers and hands. Under the covers after bedtime and before sleep I played with the finger people [ demo]—who rode horses, danced, slept, trudged across the terrain of sheets and flannel pajamas. There were finger games, finger puppets, fist faces and shadow plays. Remember this one? [Here’s the church and here’s the steeple, open the doors and see all the people.] People, lots of them, praying together. And there was another part I forget how to do with my fingers about the preacher going upstairs and saying his prayers (or “putting on airs,” I think we said sometimes). I remember using my hands as texts—for calculating, for keeping notes in ink, for knuckle mnemonics, for reading my future in the lines on my palm, for signing my name with the utterly unique print of my thumb. My hands were a world to themselves. They contained the world. Peek-a-boo! Hands open to reveal our intimate, close-up selves.
[chime]
*
He played the fiddle, and his fiddle knew her master’s hands. We cut the figures to the caller’s fancy, but
it was the magic of the fiddler’s flying hands that called up the dance from
inside us.
* We would call her a bag-lady, I guess. She spends a lot of time in the park, where, all her possessions amassed around her on the bench, she shares whatever food she might have with a squirrel which perches on her knee and eats right out of her hand.
*He had worked hard for sixty years to put food on the family table. His hands had been his tools. Every thick white scar and mangled digit told a piece of his proud story.
[chime]
Why hands? Because our hands are parts
of the whole which represent the whole. Hence the
claims of palmistry and hand reflexology. Our palms contain every organ,
every process, every year and story. Our hands hold all of who we are and maybe
even who we will be. The most ancient humans saw the human hand this way—as
meaning “human” and “life force.” Hands painted on the walls of Paleolithic
caves in
I am thinking of a wonderful advertisement that had a run on TV several years ago. A hospital nursery, lots of bassinets side by side. A nurse keeps finding little pink girl-baby caps on the floor. As fast as she puts them back on little heads, they are thrown overboard. Soon it is raining pink caps. And a tiny, perfect hand reaches up into the air and makes a fist. Power. Our hands reach for it. Our hands transmit it. Our hands declare our identity and claim our space and bring us into relationship with the world. One has only to think of the reams that have been written about the power dynamic of the handshake in the business setting. Personality, drive, confidence, not to mention the outcome of the meeting, might be read in that brief moment of hand-to-hand contact.
For a few years before the turn of the century I studied massage therapy for a while. The art of massage is taught one body surface area at a time. Each time the focus shifted to a new topic we looked at the array of verbal expressions having to do with that part of the body. Such expressions, often very old ones, told us much about what sort of emotions might lie caught in the living tissue there. A person might have “ a heavy heart,” or be “heart-broken,” or be unable to “stomach” something, or need to get something “off her chest,” or be “footloose and fancy free.”
Let me give you a quick tour of the native language south of your wrist.
on the one hand,
on the other hand;
gotta hand it to ya;
lay on hands;
hands off;
wash one’s hands of;
get out of hand;
bite the hand that feeds;
eat out of someone’s hand;
high-handed;
open-handed;
sleight of hand;
have a hand in something;
right hand man;
give someone a hand
be in good hands;
force one’s hand;
hand over fist;
hands down;
hands up;
to be a handful;
out of my hands;
to give someone the back of your hand;
underhanded;
glad-handing…
You could probably add a few yourselves. Our hands have a synecdochic relationship to our person, our life, and our world. That is, our hands stand in for our whole selves, just as our whole selves reflect the macrocosm of which we are a perfect, self-contained reflection.
[chime]
* Sisters in their seventies, separated as children by war, cup one another’s faces in their own hands and gaze back through the years to a love born in peace.
*Absently, his fingers would stroke the collie’s grizzled head and scratch behind her ears. Partners for fifteen years, devotion had grown there like the ancient live oak by the creek—rooted and strong, certain in its yielding.
*At the corner, they crossed on a long green light, probably two dozen five-year-olds and a handful of adults. But it was the children who were in charge, each holding fast to another’s hand. With individual seriousness and collective concentration, the group, linked in love, safely made the crossing.
[chime]
The hand communicates also in its role as the principle apparatus of gesture. The word “gesture” comes from the Latin root gerere, meaning to act or to do. Our hands, in making some gestures, contain our whole response to a situation, make a complete statement: they deliver a demand, they offer advice, they complain about something, they draw a line, they declare a position, they create a prop:
Double hand-cylinders over one eye—telescope
Hand shading the eyes—gesture of search
interlaced-twiddle thumb—boredom;
hands over face--grief, shame;
back of hand to forehead—stupidity;
raise hand into the air--to be noticed, counted, permitted to do something;
hear-no-evil, see-no-evil, speak-no-evil;
“You (pointing), come here” (palm back towards body);
stop (hand up, palm out)
And what happens inside when gestures such as these are directed at you? Does a summons make you anxious? [crooked finger call] Do you remember that annoying librarian in elementary school whenever anyone silences you? [“shush!”] Do you feel the frustration, the anger in the tightening of your chest muscles? This works the other way too. If you make a few of these gestures yourself, you will notice, as I did just now,
that the movements have a reciprocal body-mediated emotional effect on the sender. Memories surface. The body mobilizes. Emotion washes over us. I cannot, for example,
do
this [cover my mouth with both hands in shock] without returning to the snowy
“We have your parents here.” Fear, love, fear. When I clench my fist and shake it,
knuckles out, in front of my barred teeth, I can feel the energy of anger shoot through my limbs. I can feel my pulse quicken and my eyes narrow against the threat perceived.
Our hands move energy. Our hands conduct energy through our own bodies, into our memories and the emotions captured there; our hands evoke, conduct, and send energy
through the space that separates us from the bodies of other beings. Just as surely as the conductor of a symphony orchestra, hands and baton slicing the air, dancing in the air,
transduces through time, sometimes centuries, the composer’s passion, the gestures of our daily life move energy around us and in us.
The energy of life, that which some among us might call God, circulates. We are the conduits. The flowing current does work, transforms, creates, moves us. Knowledge that this is so has crystallized over time in spiritual practices. Some religious traditions, Buddhism and Hinduism for instance, teach certain hand gestures called mudras which evoke the sacred in the body and facilitate the process of meditation. Neo-pagan tradition acknowledges the flow of sacred energy explicitly in ritual practice. The left hand receives and the right gives, so in circle hands are grasped left palm up and right palm down and the energy moves from left to right.
Praying hands are a mudra, one which visually and somatically represents the internal circulation of sacred energy. Praying hands resolve into holding hands, meditation into salutation into salvation. That human beings use their hands to channel the energy of relationship reflects a theist or a non-theist theology I believe many Unitarian Universalists might come to share, the core of a vital, transformative, embodied theology of relationship. Spirit, universal energy, circulates in the dynamic of right relationship. We living beings on this wondrous Earth are conduits for this energy, our bones and breath, our ears and eyes, our skin and muscle the path of least resistance to its work in the world. Our hands, our body’s emissaries, carry the impulse toward creative interchange across the space between us, into the synapse, the point of connection.
“Bakerwoman God,
I am your low, soft, and being-shaped loaf…
warm as you from fire.”
“My hands are small, I know
But they’re not yours, they are my own
I am never broken.”
“I am praying with my body….
I am praying with my hands….
I am praying with my heart/
holding you dear/
who are my mother, brother, sister, father
/like this we can balance the world.”
Like this [blowing kiss].
Like this [arms open in welcome].
Like this [Namaste].
We can balance the world.
Praying hands resolve into holding hands, meditation into salutation into salvation. Blessed be.
©Margaret H. Allen
Lela was a young woman who lived in
Lela tolerated this for several years and her hatred for her life and for this old hag of a mother-in-law grew and grew until it became unbearable. She could see no escape from a brutal and meaningless life except to rid herself of her mother-in-law, or failing that, to kill herself. It had come to this. So she began to try to imagine how she could do in her mother-in-law and get away with it. But try as she might, she could not come up with a plan out of her own head. So she decided to risk consulting a local holy man, a sage and a man who knew both the light and the darkness. If anyone could think of a way to get rid of her nemesis of a mother-in-law, he could.
So she went to see him and explained the whole situation to him. “How can I get rid of her?” she asked him. “Either I die or she does; there is no other way.” He thought for a moment and then raised one finger into the air and spoke: “I have the perfect plan for you. But you must be patient and diligent in following all my instructions.” To this, of course, she eagerly agreed. “You must take this special potion—it’s in the form of sort of salve or lotion--,” he said, “and every night before your mother-in-law goes to bed, you must find a way to rub it into the skin of her body—on her back and her arms and her legs. It is very important that you rub it everywhere and rub in very well.” Lela agreed. It would be better if the poison worked faster, but she had been putting up with this situation for years, so what was a few more weeks?
And she did the work. As much as it disgusted her, she made her mother-in-law submit to the procedure. She made herself touch the awful toad of a woman who had tortured her day after day for years. She moved her hands across the back of the old woman. She kneaded the special lotion into the skin of her arms and legs. After a few weeks she went back to the holy man and said, “This isn’t working! You said this lotion would take care of her! Am I doing something wrong?” The sage replied, “No, my dear, you seem to be following my instructions faithfully. But you must be prepared to do it for a while longer. This potion works slowly, but it will work, you will see. You will get your heart’s desire.
So Lela kept at it. Every night. Sometimes during the day too. And over time it got easier for her to do. She met less resistance inside to what she had to do. So that was good. If it wasn’t so hard to do, she could do it for longer, give the poison the time it needed to work. And the old bag didn’t resist as much after a while either. She would lie down or sit still without giving her as much grief. Lela noticed how the woman’s skin began over time to feel smoother, how her muscles became softer and less resistant to her kneading fingers. She began to notice her mother-in-law’s breathing. Once she even thought she detected a muffled cry and when her mother-in-law rose from her bed, Lela thought she noticed some wetness on her cheeks. Then one day her mother-in-law spoke some quiet words. She began to tell a familiar story: a story about hate and abuse, about despair and abandonment, the story of many women in her family. And it was Lela’s story too. And at the end of the story, when the words were done and only tears remained, Lela and her mother-in-law embraced. And across the village, in the hut smoking his pipe, the holy man smiled. The plan had worked.
CHALICE LIGHTING
WORDS
from Elizabeth Roberts and Elias Amidon (eds.), Earth Prayers (San Francisco: Harper Collins, 1991)
Bakerwoman God
I am your living bread,
Strong, brown Bakerwoman God.
I am your low, soft, and being-shaped loaf.
I am your rising
bread, well kneaded
by some divine and knotty pair of knuckles,
by your warm hands.
I am bread well-kneaded.
Put me in fire, Bakerwoman God,
put me in your own bright fire.
I am warm, warm as you from fire.
I am white and gold, soft and hard,
Brown and round.
I am so warm from fire.
Alla Renee Bozarth (excerpt)
from Elizabeth Roberts and Elias Amidon (eds.), Prayers for a Thousand Years (San Francisco: Harper Collins, 1991)
Feeling the weight of duality in either palm, and bringing our palms
together in the gesture of prayer, we hold the whole world in our hands and
dare to dream:
That the world of
self
and the world of other
meet and join in the heart
as the lover receives the beloved
in union, now, and forever;
that the world of soulful darkness
and the world of spiritual light
meet and join one another
in union, now, and forever;
that the world of silent repose
and the world of courageous action
meet and join one another
in union, now, and forever;
that the world of impregnating joy
and the world of fruitful sorrow
meet and join one another
in union, now, and forever;
that the world of fluid heart
and the world of formal mind
meet and join one another
in union, now, and forever;
that all of the time past
and all of the time yet to come
may meet and join one another
in union, now, and forever.
Joseph Jastrab
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