Tactile Prayer

What are the primary ways you interact with the world? Which of the five senses do you tend towards most in the language you use to express your experience?

Some say that if you're more prone to say "I see" than "I hear you" you may be a more visual than auditory person, and if you say you were touched by some word or deed, then perhaps you're a more kinaesthetic person.

I have no issue with this perspective, but I think that it points to a more important one: that we have more than one way of experiencing the world around us and, even if we do have one or two preferred senses, we interact using all the senses available to us.

And if there's one sense we can interact with that even the blind and deaf can use for a wide range of interaction, it is certainly the sense of touch - or, perhaps more exactly, the kinaesthetic sense, since we send as well as receive communication and action with it.

The funny thing is, we take it so much for granted that we often don't think of ourselves praying with this sense. We often use our voices and ears. And we read and see pictures that enable us to more fully immerse ourselves in worship, including by watching movies that inform and encourage our faith.

And yet, we all do use our sense of touch for prayer. A well-known illustration (literally) of this is Albrecht Dürer's famous Praying Hands drawing. We have a framed reproduction of this in our house, drawn by one of my wife's brothers.

Sometimes, we hold hands with others when we pray, or even put our arms or hands on their shoulders. And it is common to place hands on the head of those being prayed for.

One popular object that people may hold on to when praying is a small cross. And of course a Bible can be a great comfort to hold. These have the added value of occupying our hands so we are less prone to get distracted from prayer with fidgeting.

Since joining the Catholic Church, I have found a wide range of other tactile enablers of prayer, from physical objects such as rosaries to actions such as kneeling during certain parts of Mass and standing in others (not that the Catholic Church has a monopoly on these behaviors).

Still, most of those forms of prayer are more augmented by touch than expressed as touch.

But one form of prayer that I appreciate more and more is - or at least can be - completely tactile. That's crossing myself. It's true that there are words that can accompany it: In the name of the Father, and the Son and the Holy Spirit. However, it's not necessary to think or even say those words while crossing yourself. The action itself is a prayer, expressing everything in our hearts that we wish to lift up in that prayer.

As I have continued on my journey of discovering deeper ways of prayer, such wordless forms increasingly make their own kind of sense.

(Copyright (c) 2011, Reg Harbeck, all rights reserved)