The body doesn’t only keep the score of trauma, as Bessel van der Kolk’s influential work rightly asserts. Through the skin, bodies soak in sermons about the passions of the flesh. They rehearse sacred and secular liturgies of touch and avoidance. Bodies pray prayers they often don’t understand. 

Popular doctrines of embodiment and touch leave us slouched and ashamed. We long to be vibrant, to truly live in flesh and blood. But the heads directing our bodies experience confusion while the hearts within them struggle to trust their own percussive beat.    

Lore Ferguson Wilbert shows us a more excellent way in her new book, Handle with Care (out February 4 through B&H Publishing). She never dismisses or diminishes the complications of embodiment, nor does she soften or toughen the rules we create to keep our bodies in check. Instead, as with the best of our theologies, she shows how our stories about touch are caught up in the greater story of Jesus, who put on flesh and touched perfectly.

Wilbert’s book joins a new and growing canon of wisdom literature that massages scar tissue caused by unfruitful teaching, and aims to recover a fulfilled and fulfilling vision of touch, sex and relationships. (Aimee Byrd’s 2018 text Why Can’t We Be Friends? and Rachel Welcher’s forthcoming The Pitfalls of Purity Culture share this space.) Beauty, clarity and the firstfruits of healing attend Wilbert’s words. Ahead of the book’s release, we traded emails to discuss its dimensions and implications.

Aarik Danielsen: You describe a gospel that can’t be preached without mentioning touch: from the Incarnation to instances of miraculous touch, from the rough handling of Jesus’ body at the crucifixion to the way he uses touch to rebuild Thomas’ faith. What do we lose when—for legitimate, short-sighted, reasons—we downplay or erase touch from our gospel storytelling?

Lore Ferguson Wilbert: We have to back up a bit to answer this question to the very issue of embodiment. Embodiment matters and we know it matters for two reasons: First, God created us with bodies. Second, Jesus was the embodied God on earth. So before touch matters, embodiment matters. And if embodiment matters, then we have to ask: “What things about embodiment are intrinsic to the experience of being human?” and that brings us to the five senses, touch being one. All of our senses matter in all of life, yet so much of the Christian experience is about dulling our senses and sort of “making it through” to the new Kingdom, a white-knuckling it around our hungers, thirsts, felt needs, etc. To downplay our senses in the gospel’s story-telling is to repeat the errors of the gnostics or early ascetics. If embodiment matters, then so do touch, taste, sight, etc. Our mission on earth is to bring all of what being human means under the submission of God’s best intentions for it, not pretending it doesn’t matter, but that it matters all the more.

You draw ideas about touch out of passages that might seem unlikely on first blush. Passages like Ephesians 5, which we tend to use primarily to discuss or debate gender roles in marriage. What surprised you about where or how often you found references to touch in Scripture?

I expected to see more “do nots” regarding touch, but the more I read with an eye toward these things, the more permissive I saw Scripture being. Many of us learn that to be a Christian is to “deny, deny, deny,” but here I’m seeing Jesus say, “love your neighbor as yourself.” What? Meaning unless I love myself—and truly admit to doing so, I cannot love my neighbor? Or Paul saying, “Husbands care for your wives as you care for yourself.” All through Scripture there’s this beloved call for the Christian to give attention to their first home: their story, their skin, their body, their most immediate boundary of being.

Writing about our #MeToo and #ChurchToo-informed climate, you say: “One of the greatest errors in our moment in history will be if we let this moment pass us by without a better understanding and practice of healthy, pure and good touch.” Are we ready to do that? Your book seems to be an act of faith that we are. Do you see further acts of cultural reckoning and repentance that need to take place before we step into the positive? 

Ready? No. I don’t think we’re ready. But I mean that in the way that Susan asks Mr. Beaver if Aslan is safe and he replies, “Of course he isn’t safe, but he’s good.” There’s a riskiness to trusting God and walking in the ways he has for us that seem the antithesis of safe or for which we never feel totally prepared or ready. But that doesn’t mean we don’t still practice them. Touching humans, closing the gaps that exist between them and us, is an act of vulnerability and is not safe, but it is good. As for reckoning and repentance, yes. And that should come before the gap is closed. We should begin with repentance, and reconcile by drawing near, if we can and it’s appropriate. As with any sin, it isn’t enough to simply own the wrong, we have to right the wrong. That’s what this book is about: how do we right the wrong? 

A section early in the book bears the title “The Stories We Carry.” How many stories, in addition to your own, did it feel as though you were carrying as you wrote? How does story serve theology—and vice versa—as we begin reforming our doctrines of touch?

I felt so weighed down by the stories of touch while I wrote. While writing, I had both a friend who was accused of sinful touch and a friend who was touched sinfully. I knew pastors who feared false accusations and parishioners who were desperate to close the gaps that existed between them and their shepherds. I wrote that section because most of us tend to think our own story is the norm and everyone is operating with the same set of experiences and beliefs, but it’s important to recognize that we are all both characters and storytellers in and of our small story and one big cosmic story. We have to recognize what I call the “broken bloodlines” that run through us because these are informing how we view our theology of God, the person of Jesus, and the life of the Christian. To deny these realities is to be disingenuous at best, a denial of God at worst. Adam Young says, “To deny our wounds is to deny God.” If we deny we carry the brokenness of all that we’ve done and has been done to us, we deny God’s powerful ability and intention to heal that brokenness. So I might say, “To deny our createdness and our story is to deny our Creator and master storyteller.”

You write often of your own relationship to touch, and your innate tendencies. How, if at all, did writing and researching the book change or deepen your relationship with touch? In the process, did you come across people, either in the larger culture or your own sphere, who exemplify lives of healthy touch? 

I want to be careful to not set “healthy touch” up as a particular thing. A life that exemplifies “healthy touch” is a life that asks, “How do I care for myself, my story, my heart, and my body so that I can care best for the story, heart, and body of the person in front of me?” And that’s going to look different for every person. 

My aim isn’t to get people to touch everyone in a particular way; it’s to get everyone to ask, “Am I caring well for the person I am and the person in front of me?” A person who exemplifies this is a person who is willing to be vulnerable about their own story, fears, hopes, etc., and who is willing to risk vulnerability with others.

You discuss how a true awareness of your body reminded you that you were “mere flesh and blood, not a superhuman” and led you to consider a “God who came in flesh like mine and knew its limitations.” It seems so much of the Christian life consists of bending an acknowledgement of ourselves and our world into acknowledgement of God. How can we begin to practice that and develop a greater sense of how Jesus’ embodiment affects our own?

To be alive in 2020 is to not be paying attention. We have ten thousand things demanding our attention at every moment and each one seems to be the most important, including our own hungers and needs. But to be a Christian means to be a person who is alive to what God is doing and to what the Holy Spirit is doing. We develop that practice by slowing down and paying attention. 

I write in the book that the act of taking a break from writing and rubbing my forearms at midday reminds me that I am not the Creator and cannot say everything that needs to be said. I am created, limited, and the very fact that my forearms ache is proof of that. So we pay attention to the embodied God who slept when he was tired, ate when he was hungry, hid when he needed space, wept when he was afraid, wanted his friends near him when he was feeling alone. All of those things matter, yet we often act like we’re too important for them to matter. We practice them mattering by acting like matter, created beings, and not God.

To live out the spirit of this book will mean, as you admit throughout, living in a way that makes little sense to either the church or outside world as currently constituted. What advice or encouragement do you have for readers who embrace the book but fear taking next steps?

My best encouragement is to find a small group of people, no more than two to three, and talk through the questions at the back of the book honestly. The most important takeaway for the reader is not to go around touching everyone, but to begin to be honest about our own stories of touch and begin to see how they inform how we touch, or don’t touch. That’s why I began the book with my own story, because our stories are the most important tool and the most important inhibitor to handling other humans with care. Our story forms what we believe about racism, politics, religion, sexuality, immigration, ministry, education, family, parenting, marriage, singleness, war, theology, and everything else. To be honest about that is to accept our humanness, our createdness. It is what Wendell Berry called “a starting place.”