To Touch Each Other

“I am drinking in the sun

and the lilies again are spread across the water.

I know what they want is to touch each other.

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and I am watching the lilies bow to each other,

then slide on the wind and the tug of desire,

close, close to one another.” The Pond, Mary Oliver

We have begun this physical-distance dance, learning how to be near each other without touching.  You meet a friend in the driveway and you ponder how to greet without touching?  It seems so foreign to pull back your arm’s attempt to extend a hand, to wave with arms that want instead to hug.

Two months ago, if you witnessed a scene of six chairs in a driveway in a circle wide enough to hold twelve you would have wondered what made them so upset that they sit so distant from each other. Now, in an instant, you know the reason.

Yes, we want to touch each other, even we introverts. We ‘slide on the wind and the tug of desire/close, close to another’ because it is in the nature of all living things to want to touch.  Is that what drives our anxiety, our anger, our sadness? That the God-instilled desire to be close together is gone, for a time?

God, restore to us soon our ability to touch each other, and until then help us to know that this tug of desire arises from our longing to extend the warm grasp of your hand upon us. Amen.