Nudge: Awakening Each Other to the God Who’s Already There

Ponder: Touch
Do You Have a Touch for the Kingdom?
Touching Jesus

Right now I am looking out on waters where the largest octopus on the planet lives. The giant Pacific octopus, known as Enteroctopus dofeini, lurks below the surface of the waters outside my study window and hunts in the two-mile stretch of Puget Sound that separates Orcas Island from Sucia Islands. These octopuses, which are some of the most beautiful, intelligent and graceful creatures God made, can get to be bigger than a Ford Expedition, or about the size of a whale shark. They only leave their dens at night or on dark, dreary days, so it’s not easy to have a “close encounter.”

The octopus may be the most high-touch creature on earth. Each of its eight tentacles has 240 suckers, for a total of 1,920 suction cups. And each suction cup is a multisensory organ that at the same time it touches, smells, tastes and hears what it grasps to tell whether it’s holding some crabs and cockles or a lump of coral. The octopus can also change color in the blink of its eye, going from red to brown to communicate with other hunters or to hide in its environment. Its tongue functions as a drill, which can bore through the thickest abalone shell.

Imagine that you are that octopus, sleeping quietly in your den when a Coast Guard cutter passes overhead. Powered by diesel engines and gas turbines, the boat creates a huge ruckus in the environment. The water rocks you awake. Your sonic environment is now disrupted, and nothing seems normal. There is that “nearness to tremendousness” that Emily Dickinson talked about. But do you know what is happening? Do you know what that “tremendousness” is or what it means?

That is sort of the way I feel about God. There is obviously something significant happening overhead and around me. In fact, I can experience it and tell you about my experience. But I have no clue what is happening. As multisensory as I am, and no matter how much I ponder, that Coast Guard cutter is beyond my understanding.

Elisabeth Koenig, who teaches discernment to seminary students, invites us to imagine that we’re that octopus in another way.

Imagine that your mind and heart, your values and principles, your moral faculty and your imagination, are like the octopus’ suckers and tentacles, probing your inner and outer environment “tasting” what’s there to tell you what will nurture you and what will not. Imagine how your act of paying attention to all these different tastes can actually cause new discerning taste buds to grow!

Christianity comes with so many tactile imperatives that it is a touch culture and the church a “touching place.” The highest expression of Christianity is not its doctrines, or even its art, but its manifestations of the passion people feel toward Christ and the compassion toward each other, the outsider and outlier. More than any other sense, it is the church as a touching place that makes it the paradise of pariahs. God connects to us in human touch.

Everything humans handle has a tendency to secrete meaning.
—Marcel Duchamp

For Jesus, neither love of God nor love of neighbor/stranger took a backseat to each other. They always sat together and held hands. That’s why nudges are touching times and the nudge church a touching place. This phrase “touching place” comes from John Bell and Graham Maule of the Iona Community in Scotland, who collaborated on a hymn they called “A Touching Place.”

The hymn begins this way: “Christ’s is the world in which we move, Christ’s are the folk we’re summoned to love, Christ’s is the voice which calls us to care. And Christ is the one who meets us there …”

To the lost, Christ shows His face,
to the unloved He gives His embrace,
to those who cry in pain or disgrace
Christ makes, with His friends, a touching place.

Google any painting of Madonna and child. You will find the same two things. First, every painting has Mary holding Jesus (only a handful in history have Joseph holding Jesus). Second, every painting has Mary looking at Jesus. The arms and the eyes—the cradling touch and the caressing look. Both need to be combined in touching-place churches. But touching places are more arms than eyes, more high-touch than high-seeing. Biblical knowing (yada) is not abstract or distancing, but engaging and linking.

A young man was killed in a tragic, freak accident along the eastern seaboard. He had grown up in Pastor Brian Bauknight’s church in Pittsburgh, and on the day of his memorial service the United Methodist sanctuary was overflowing. As part of the service, his mother asked to speak a few words to the congregation.

Although it was difficult for her to talk, she managed to say two important things. First, “I am thankful to God for every day that I was given to hug my son close.” Second, “I am grateful that God has given me each of you in this church to hug me close right now.”

As a little girl left the house for the bus, she said to her mother, “I’m going to be sad today.” Her mother asked, “Why? Aren’t you feeling well?” The little girl said, “No. But when we’re sad, all the teachers take turns hugging us.”

Put your hands, Thomas, on the crawling head of a child
imprisoned in a cot in Romania.
Place your finger, Thomas, on the list of those
who have disappeared in Chile.
Stroke the cheek, Thomas, of the little girl sold in
prostitution in Thailand.
Touch, Thomas, the gaping wounds of my world.
—Poet Kate McIlhagga, “Thomas”

It’s that way with God, too, and with God’s church. The act of hugging and being hugged is the body of Christ’s best nudge. Maybe the great Jonathan Edwards didn’t get it exactly right. Maybe we are less “sinners in the hands of an angry God” than we are “sinners in the hands of a hugging God.” My favorite image of “Our Father” is a loving parent, holding on in a big bear hug, as a rebellious child flails away, struggling with all the child’s might to break free, yet all the while hoping that the arms never let go. The church needs to be so clear about its identity as the body of Christ that everything it does generates a gravitational pull toward the heart.

If you want to reach others, you have to reach out. D. H. Lawrence is famous for his remark that sexual intercourse is an act of holy communion. But so is the touch of tenderness, a kiss good-bye, the wiping away of tears from a child, the holding of a door open for a complete stranger: all acts of holy communion. In fact, ethics is learning the touching behaviors that turn human communion into holy communion. The touch of connection is the true currency of the church that makes things possible.

I will rule over you with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm.
—Ezekiel 20:33–40

The potential of nudging through touch is scanned in this refection on touch by James B. Stockinger, a sociologist at the University of California at Berkeley. In his survey of our dependency on the hands of other people, the power of nudging with our hands becomes obvious. We receive ourselves as a gift from the hands of others.

Each of us lives in and through an immense movement of the hands of other people. The hands of other people lift us from the womb. The hands of other people grow the food we eat, weave the clothes we wear and build the shelters we inhabit. The hands of other people give pleasure to our bodies in moments of passion and aid and comfort in times of affliction and distress. It is in and through the hands of other people that the commonwealth of nature is appropriated and accommodated to the needs and pleasures of our separate individual lives, and, at the end, it is the hands of other people that lower us into the earth.

As a touching place, the church enables Jesus’ followers to thrive because of its social environment that stimulates the senses. In fact, recent studies have shown that sensory deprivation is literally torture. Why do mammals breast-feed? The obvious answer is: food. But the deeper answer is: touch. The brain needs stimulation that comes from contact and connection if it is to develop. In fact, research now reveals that the mother’s touch is more important than the mother’s milk. Research shows that you can live longer without the milk than without the touch. Research also reveals that more health benefits come from spending time at the watercooler than lounging by the pool in your backyard, because it’s at the watercooler where you’re more likely to connect and be connected. Death is a noncontact sport.

The 21st century is increasingly being asked to live without touch. Evidences of a touchless culture are everywhere. We live in a totally sex-obsessed culture, but a culture that refuses to explore the depth of the meaning and signifcance of sex. Contacts with co-workers are bathed in “don’t touch” workshops. In hospitals, we can drug people; we can hook electrodes up to their brains and give them shocks against their will; we can put people in straitjackets; but we aren’t allowed to hug them. Death row inmates are not allowed “contact visits” where they can touch or hug family members except the last visit before their execution.

Even with touchless toilets, faucets, hand driers, and now holy water dispensers, how many of us secretly cringe whenever we touch door handles? Who can pick up the remote in a hotel room without wondering what the last person who used it was doing? Who doesn’t immediately pull down the hotel bedspread because we don’t want to imagine what happened on it since it was last washed? Who can ask for a lime or lemon without worrying about the bacteria still on the skin? Who can pick up a woman’s purse from the bottom for fear she has set it on the bathroom floor? Who can shake hands with a driver getting out of a car without flinching, knowing that the number-one pastime while driving alone is picking one’s nose? Who licks envelopes anymore, or puts one’s mouth to the top of an unwashed can?

The role that trust and touch will play in the future can only be imagined, but cannot be overstated. Since you touch not so much with hands or fingers but with skin, your skin is your major touching organism. That’s how you gather information about your environment and learn what to trust. For some reason we decorate our touching organism, which already comes in a range of colors. But we desire color add-ons through cosmetics and tattoos, and the more self-conscious we become about our touching organisms, the more we lavish on decorations. You might even call tattoos the new Ebenezers, altars that commemorate the touchstones of our lives.

You can also feel the vibes of the future in such phenomena as snuggies, cuddle parties, mass huggings, and even the robotic pillow called “The Hug.” Shaped like a child but the size and softness of a throw pillow, you can send The Hug to distant family members like your grandma. The sound of your grandma’s name causes the pillow to come alive: It lights up, plays sounds, and reaches out its arms to physically hug the grandparent. Press the right paw, and the touching ends and the plush pillow says good-bye. For touching to be a third rail, as it increasingly has become in many risk-management churches, is for the church to be out of touch with the culture in which it finds itself, a culture where loneliness and isolating connectedness are some of the great diseases of our age.

I shall never forget the 2003 visit of Indian spiritual leader Mata Amritanandamayi (affectionately known as “Amma”) to Columbia University, where she offered blessings in the form of “healing hugs.”

At Columbia, people came to Arledge Auditorium hours early to line up for their hugs. I had no idea why a line was backed up the length of the block, but watched as everyone who waited was given a numbered token, an orange sticky dot, and what I later found out was a 64-page guide to hugging Amma without hurting her. The key is: Don’t hug her; let her hug you. One person stood in line seven hours for a hug. Everyone took off their shoes, and many chanted as they waited. Everyone also brings an “offering” to Amma.

In the category of “What Some People Won’t Do for a Hug,” there was the story of a man going around and faking choking episodes, apparently to get attention from women. He flails his arms, coughs and sputters. After a woman rushes over and “saves” him with the Heimlich (a piece of apple actually hurls from his mouth), he showers her with thanks, hugs and kisses. “‘There’s been no crime. Our hands are kind of tied here,’ a sheriff’s spokesman said.”

Summit, N.J., is a bedroom community of Wall Street. It lost more than a dozen of its residents on 9/11. In the aftermath of the collapse of the Twin Towers, the clergy of Summit felt called to do something. Some started prayer services. Others traveled to ground zero. But one pastor, Charles Rush, felt called to do something different.

Pastor Rush put on his clergy collar and went to the Summit train station. New Jersey transit was depositing at the Summit station those survivors fleeing from the carnage. The priest did not know what to do, so he simply stood there. And as the ashen, dirt-caked, cement-crusted passengers stumbled of the train, they saw him standing there, a priest silently testifying to the hope of the Gospel. And they walked over to him and touched him. That’s all. No words. No smile. No nods. They just touched him. Hundreds of them. Thousands of them. They just touched him.

The church has been more prone to “take a stand” on issues or “take a vote” on programs than touch. Touch is a centripetal force that includes and embraces. Taking stands is a centrifugal force that separates and divides. While the rest of the world is moving, the one taking a stand is frozen in time like kids playing freeze tag, waiting for the sign that says it’s OK to move again. Christ ran around touching people and tagging them. Every Jesus tag offered freedom. Every Jesus tag let the person tagged know they had been touched by God.

Jesus had a touching presence. He nudged with touch and was a master toucher. He touched people and allowed himself to be touched. He did not just heal lepers. He touched lepers. My friend Ken Ulmer, one of the greatest preachers alive today, likes to say, “We need to get the word out: The disciples were not bodyguards.” The disciples didn’t keep people in the crowds from touching Jesus, even the unclean and the untouchables. When they did function like bodyguards, Jesus rebuked them: “Let the children come to me …”

Both Mary Magdalene and Thomas want to touch Jesus’ body. Mary is told no. Thomas is told it’s OK; but once Thomas can, he no longer needs to. Thomas is known as Thomas Didymus, Thomas the Twin, the twin of each of us. We will never know in this life whether Thomas touched Jesus or not. But whether he did or didn’t, Jesus invited him to.

Some things are out of our hands. Some things are in our hands. Either way, we’re in good hands when our times are in God’s hands. In fact, sometimes we’re told to keep our hands off. Just because touch is the touchstone of faith doesn’t mean it’s the only stone turned. This is the backstory of Uzzah, who thought it was his duty to protect the ark and to guardian the things of God. What Uzzah learned the hard way was that God can bodyguard himself. We are to carry the ark, but keep our fingerprints off the ark. We can carry the holy, but God doesn’t need our smudges to ward evil from the ark. We are to just keep carrying the holy, and God will do the rest.

For Jesus, to carry the holy was to reach out and touch, not the cherubim and seraphim, but the castaways and sinners. Jesus was always reaching out to touch the untouchables, and the untouchables were always reaching out to touch him. Before healing a leper, Jesus reached out his hand and touched him. Before bringing the daughter of Jarius back to life, he took her hand and said, “Little girl, get up!” Before Lazarus could walk after Jesus raised him from the dead, Jesus made his disciples touch him.

“If only I touch his cloak, I will be made well.” Everything is going against her: woman, poor, Jew, sick, bleeding (ritually unclean and thus isolated, cut off, alone). The best she could do, she thought, was touch the hem of his garment, and yet Jesus had such high-touch sensitivity that he called out, “Who touched me?” The very fact Jesus had to say, “Don’t touch me,” as he is entering into the mystery of resurrection, testifies to his high-touch ministry.

Don’t you sense me, ready to break
into being at your touch?
—Rainer Maria Rilke

The church has often mistaken “Touch me not” as words for all time and not words for the time it takes for Jesus to become our risen Lord.

The touch nudge is the open invitation to reach out to Christ, who will grab hold of us and not let go in an enfolding, upholding embrace through all those rendering experiences of life, all of which Jesus has gone through before, even death itself. In the neogothic College Chapel of St. Patrick’s College, Maynooth, there is a striking crucifixion in stained glass. The crucified Christ is depicted in an intense trinitarian ensemble, with the Father holding the arms of the cross of his crucified Son, while the Holy Spirit in the form of a dove hovers between the Father and the Crucified One, the sign of the coming “new creation” out of the pain of the passion.

Where’s the rub?

There’s the rub!

There is no rub. In an increasing number of churches, touch is the third-rail sense and the third rail of religion. In the church today, afraid of any number of lawsuits or pandemics, start “touching” and you will get into trouble, be fired, or sent to some boundary-maintenance, sexual-harassment seminars.

Even in our moments of praise and worship, we rise together but stand as one, lifting our hands up to the heavens, funneling into ourselves God’s presence and turning each worshipper into a private cone of adoration. Even in our highest and holiest moments of worship, our egos resist being mere vessels for the Spirit. We want to be the focus of the attention; we want for our story to be heard and celebrated by God, and so we focus God’s attention our way. Seldom if ever do people hold hands or touch each other in praise and worship. We are back to the holiness code of the Pharisees, for whom “Don’t touch” was the prime directive.

Jesus was a healer, which meant more than curing disease. Savior and salvation are both health and healing words. Jesus’ healing techniques were customized for each sick person, but there was one constant: the healing power of touch. Jesus’ high-touch healing turned the religious establishment’s concept of holiness on its head. Holiness is not separation from the unclean and unholy; it is touching the unclean and unholy. For Jesus, nothing and no one are accursed. Whatever is unholy, impure, and corrupt, we must touch it, “for this too Christ died.” Whatever is unclean, the church has to pick it up, for that is its vocation.

Holiness is not “being good.” Holiness is being about the bad: touching unclean lepers; eating and drinking with criminals, tax collectors and prostitutes; letting yourself be touched by soiled souls.

For a church that is a touching place, the question is not “Do I touch?” The church always touches. The question is, “Do I know when to touch and where not to touch?” If the life of faith is a dance, as Jesus once compared it, what kind of dance is it when you don’t touch? We touch each other truthfully and healingly as dancing partners, as members of the same body. And the healing touch of love not only mends wounds, but discovers and discloses as well.

An honest answer is like a kiss on the lips.
—Proverbs 24:26

With every person you touch, you hold a life in your hands.

If you’re on the phone, touch-nudge someone with your voice.

If someone is depressed, poke them with a joke. Sharp elbows in the ribs are our second nature.

If someone is lonely, touch them with a kiss.

If someone is sick, touch them with oil. You can sign someone’s forehead, not just by the sign of ashes on the forehead on Ash Wednesday, but by the healing sign of oil any day of the year.

If someone is afraid, touch them with an anointing for mission.

If “this old house” is starting to seam and succumb to gravity, touch the cracks. The elderly should not be reduced to remembering the way it felt to be touched.

If someone has cooked you a great meal, thank them for your fullness by inviting them to rub your stomach—somebody’s got to do it.

Here is the great irony: The more high-tech the culture, as John Naisbitt first pointed out in the 1970s, the less high-touch the culture. Just when a Facebook culture is jaded by the vicarious, virtual, derivative, secondary experiences of the screen and is screaming for the face-to-face, in-your-face, touch-God’s-face experiences of the raw and real, the church is distancing itself from touch. The wildly successful iPhone and Apple computers have shown the appeal of touch screens, touch pads, and multitouch games. Interfaces that deploy touch are being built into software, which can already handle up to four simultaneous touch gestures: scrolling, rotating, stretching, shrinking. You can experience all four of them on the most popular iPhone app, Koi Pond. Soon screens will disappear, and the images once fat will become three-dimensional. In that holographic world, the primary way anyone will know what is true and what is telegraphic will be the resistance of the real, the pushback that comes from touch.

One of the best ways to prepare for what is coming is to develop new touching-in and touching-out rituals. When you first greet someone, touch them on the shoulder, hug them or give them a kiss. When you say good-bye to someone, pat them on the back, squeeze their arm, or grab their hand.

One of the best touching-out rituals is what I call a TAP: Touch and Pray. “Would you mind if I prayed for you before I go?” It takes no spiritual bravado to do this. Besides, most people don’t know what it’s like to be at the receiving end of prayer. This touching-out ritual of prayer can be as simple as a “Bless this person I’m touching now, and may they know your peace” or the Lord’s Prayer. The former head of the Vatican Bank, Archbishop Paul Marcinkus, had a fund-raising saying: “You can’t run the Church on Hail Marys.” That may be. But if you can’t run the church on Hail Marys, you can run your life on Our Fathers, and you should run the church on Our Fathers. Jesus prayed 21 times in the Gospels original prayers, and every one he began with “Our Father.”

You can count on what we’re now calling the five “God-guarantees” with every person you touch. Remember these? They’re worth repeating here.

Every person you brush up against is a child of God, a Jesus-in-you person.

Every brush is a bush.

Every best is a blest.

Every worst is a juncture for grace.

Every person needs a nudge.

Or to translate these five God-guarantees into less poetic form:

Human beings are created in the image of God.

God is already present in that person’s life in the form of some burning bush.

The best things about that person are blessings from God.

The worst things about that person are arenas for redemption.

People are hungry for encouragement and love.

Not long before he died, Studs Terkel wrote a memoir. It has the best title of any memoir I have ever read. The title comes from a Dylan Thomas poem:

And every evening at sundown
I ask a blessing on the town,
For whether we last the night or no
I’m sure is always touch and go.

The title is: Touch and Go.

Or, TAG.

Tag, you’re it.

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The E. Stanley Jones professor of evangelism at Drew University in Madison, N.J., and visiting distinguished professor at George Fox University in Portland, Ore., Leonard Sweet has served in leadership in academia and in the United Methodist Church for many years. He has written hundreds of articles and authored or co-authored many books, including Jesus Manifesto (with Frank Viola), 11: Indispensible Relationships You Can’t Be Without, The Gospel According to Starbucks and SoulTsunami.

This is an excerpt from Nudge: Awakening Each Other to the God Who’s Already There by Leonard Sweet. Copyright © 2010 by Leonard Sweet. Nudge is published by David C. Cook. Publisher permission required to download and reproduce in any way. All rights reserved.

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