Touch

This morning, the message in church started off with the fairly flashy setpiece of Ezekiel and G-d standing over the dry and broken bones of the dead of Israel. "Prophesy to the bones," G-d says - and Ezekiel does. Clothing the bones with sinew, clothing them with flesh, clothing them with skin. "Prophesy to the breath," G-d says, and of the four winds the will of G-d draws the breath of life, and the Israelites rise again, endowed with life, and restored in their relationship to him.

The good news is (please pardon the pun ...), the message in the end was less Grand G-dinol, and spoke to relationships themselves. How deep they run, how important they are - how ours, to G-d, has the ultimate power, but also how ours with one another are so importatnt.

Through the repetition of the phrase, "broken relationships" and my priest's message of such deep love, and encouragement, I sat and watched an action of my father's.

Two rows in front of me sat a couple I have seen often before. Older than my parents, unlike physcially, in one moment the husband told me he was like my dad in an amazing way.

Across the back of the pew, he had his arm around his wife. His thumb kept playing against her shouder blade.

He wasn't connecting his action to the words we were hearing spoken. His habit was so familiar, so deep, it was plain to see his thumb had been in it for probably half a century or more. It wasn't conscious of itself. She wasn't conscious of it either. Just touching, touching. Affection.

I thought about my post recently, and before it even crossed my mind to wonder whether "this woman knows what she has" in this - I realized joyously that it doesn't matter in the slightest. That love like that is a blessing, and that its generation in the world isn't an accounting humans are equipped to make nor judge. Just that we engender the blessing, and give it - unthinking. Receiving it unthinking is just as well. As long as the blessing is given. As long as it exists.

My dad's hand rested on the back of the pew for my mother. But, for many years, it was there around me. Mom has sung in the choir since I was a girl. And I sat beside him for so long. I would silently ball up my hand in a fist, and he would cup it in his palm. When I was little, when I was a bigger kid, when I was a grown up too. It never stopped. For thirty-five years, I could ball up my fist, and find it a home in my father's warm hand.

And he sat like that, his arm on the back of the pew, stretching out his back muscles a little bit. And sometimes his thumb would play on my shoulder blade.



Physical affection - and love like that ... unthinking, unbidden - and unstinting - are a great joy of life in abundance. I'm so grateful.