My uncle and aunt have a dog called Meg. I don’t know enough about dogs to be able to say if Meg is an odd dog, as in, odd as far as dogs go. But she seems odd to me: she gets easily hyped up and overexcited, she has an annoying (but sometimes funny) knack for getting at food that’s been put in the middle of the table, and she gets strangely timid around particular other breeds (one very hairy and quite elegant dog had her cowed the other day). But the most striking thing about Meg is how touchy-feely she is. I met a dog called Linus a few weeks back, who wailed (insofar as dogs wail) when we left him. Meg’s like that, except that even more than Linus she needs physical contact with humans: holding her paw, rubbing her belly, giving her a hug.
Here’s my hunch: Meg isn’t so different from us. I don’t (or at least, I don’t anymore) jump up and grab food from the table with my teeth; nor do I pull on the lead. But I do need love. And I’ve spent enough time away from family over the years to know that love expressed over the phone – while beautiful, and comforting – has a kind of melancholy to it, the very joy of contact exposing distance from the true presence of the other person. One fallacy we too readily fall for is a kind of rationalistic dualism, where our minds are what really matters. We forget both the limits of our minds – we can know no God’s eye view – and the reality of our flesh, and with it our creatureliness. It was in recognition of this that writers of old spoke of the amphibious nature of man. His soul he may share with angels and things divine; but with his body he shares in the nature of beasts. We imperil ourselves, and our walk with the Lord, when we forget or under-appreciate one or the other.
Love desires intimacy, and it desires presence. Both of those require all of our natures. So as ensouled bodies, and embodied souls, we ought not to deride the physical, nor have some naive view of that which is spiritual. A hand on a shoulder is not “merely physical”, just as it would be reductionistic to deny the significance of tears (that is, unless we gained them cycling in cold weather). We humans speak our souls through our bodies, and give something of our hearts to those we love in even the most banal of physical gestures.
Yet in our society, love that expresses itself physically is a thing for children, whose innocence gets them off the hook of civility; or it is for lovers. Largely, I think, that is because the physical has become the realm of the sexual. Just as we lack a proper conception of godly sexual desire, because our culture has stolen so much of sexuality for godless purposes, so we struggle to understand the innocence of human desire for physicality and contact with another. Prudishness is our response, but prudishness only deepens the problem, entailing as it does the assumption that desire for the physical can only be sexual, and that the sexual can only really be the lustful.
So we are left with an odd state of affairs. Stroking my brother’s dog the other day – who’s perhaps even more hug-prone than Meg – I was struck by the power of physical contact, both on me (it lifted my spirits) and on the dog in question. But if, like me, you are single; and if, like me, you are by God’s grace seeking to live a holy life, then you find yourself in an odd situation of having greater physical intimacy with a dog than with any human. That’s an odd place to be, and it’s one of the reasons I wouldn’t want a dog myself.
Where am I going in all this? I don’t have many answers. Save to say that a hand on a shoulder can go a long way, that the kindly embrace of a friend is a profound means of grace. And perhaps more of us, who are called to it, ought to be seeking to be married. It is a gift from our God for our good, and for the building of his kingdom. Let us not be naive about our humanity, and the needs we have.
This morning at church we shared the Lord’s supper. I sometimes struggle to articulate why it is such a means of grace to me, save that Christ himself instituted it, so it must be fairly important. But Tim Chester makes the point, in his book Truth we can Touch, that we humans need physical, tangible signs of love. With Christ resurrected and ascended, he probably won’t be giving any of us a hug anytime soon. But he does give us to taste of the bread and wine that is to us, in the power of his spirit, his own body and blood. And that too is a profound grace.
The Fourth Discourseman
The Four Discoursemen 