On May 16, AFP News Agency posted a video of a woman hugging her aging mother through a plastic sheet configured into something called a “hug glove.” The video shows the two women embracing through a pair of rigged-up plastic gloves attached to the sheet, smiling, pulling away, and then embracing again. And again. The hugging lasted close to a minute.
Carolyn Ellis, from Ontario, says she created the “hug glove” because her mother lives alone and the mother-daughter pair had gone two months without hugging each other during the pandemic’s early days. “This allowed [life] to kind of get back to normal,” says Ellis. “It felt like it really gave us a sense of hope, that it’s not going to be forever. That physical feeling just felt so like home; you know, a hug from your mom. It just felt so good.”
The video went viral. Ellis had struck a cultural chord. People are suffering from lack of touch.
In addition to the deaths of family members, various financial crises, and the educational upheaval wrought by Covid-19, many have faced a secondary “pandemic” that in some cases has perhaps rivaled the disease itself — a plague of isolation and limited physical touch that has already started to take a toll on friendships, marriages, emotional health, mental health, and church fellowship. All the while dealing with these stressors themselves, church leaders are trying to sort out how to love people well during a famine of touch.
A plague of isolation … has already started to take a toll on friendships, marriages, emotional health, mental health, and church fellowship.
Emaciated and Alone
“The mental health crisis that this has caused is 100% real,” says Andy Garner, a licensed marriage and family therapist and a former PCA teaching elder. Garner, who founded Midtown Nashville Counseling, says that he and his fellow counselors have been “crazy busy” since the pandemic’s onset, particularly working with clients whose marriages have been strained because of the stress, and with clients who are single and living alone.
“What happened is [those who tend to be anxious types] quarantined, and then they got inside their own heads, and they became more and more isolated, less and less touched, no social interaction. Lots of them started having anxiety attacks. … I have 25-30-year-olds going to the emergency room because they thought they were having heart attacks.”
And then there are those who have been separated from their loved ones in assisted living or retirement homes. Garner says a recent client broke down in tears in his office while describing her visits to her mother through a plexiglass screen.
Garner says his own uncle, a cheerful man and a practicing lawyer into his 80s, began declining mentally and physically after his sister died. He was admitted to the hospital, where he wasn’t allowed to be touched by or visited by anyone, and died shortly after.
“He was such a lively person, and to see someone just shrink like that …,” Garner trails off.
Down the road at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, Becky Kiern, a nurse on the cardiac surgery team as well as an author and Bible teacher at Christ Presbyterian Church in Nashville, says during the pandemic she has seen higher levels of trauma than she’s seen in 15 years of nursing.
“I would spend a lot of time listening to spouses who had just experienced the most dramatic few days of their lives, and many had done so alone. Imagine it, your husband’s having chest pain, you drive him to the ER, where you have to drop him at the front door, and then you can’t see him again for five or seven days, all while he undergoes testing and massive surgery,” she says.
Craving Touch
Back in April, while the world was trying to figure out how to mitigate the spread of the coronavirus, Dr. Anthony Fauci issued a statement saying it would be best if everyone ceased shaking hands, forever. Two months later, The New York Times surveyed 511 epidemiologists on when they believed they would return to various habits. Of those interviewed, 42% said they would not hug or shake hands for more than a year, and 6% said they would never do them again.
In the months that have followed, many Americans have returned to church and school. Many gather socially and dine out, while others continue to stay relatively quarantined. But even as the majority is returning to a new “normal,” social interactions often feel awkward at best, and cold and distant more generally.
In a New York Times article, Eduardo Franco, professor of Oncology and Epidemiology & Biostatistics at McGill University in Montreal, Canada, said, “The worst casualty of the epidemic is the loss of human contact.”
A child can no longer expect a shoulder squeeze from his favorite teacher. An adult daughter can no longer count on a bear hug from her aging father. A churchgoer who lives alone can no longer look forward to a warm handshake at the door on Sunday morning.
But we know this isn’t good. “Humans have brain pathways that are specifically dedicated to detecting affectionate touch,” says Johannes Eichstaedt, a computational social scientist and psychology professor at Stanford University. “Affectionate touch is how our biological systems communicate to one another that we are safe, that we are loved, and that we are not alone.”
Various research has demonstrated the undisputed benefits for those who receive regular healthy touch. For instance, hugs — or other types of firm intentional touch — can significantly reduce stress by calming the nervous system, lowering heart rates in adults, and regulating an infant’s body temperature. Studies have also linked comforting touch to reducing cardiovascular stress and strengthening the immune system.
Sharon K. Farber writes in Psychology Today that people who don’t receive the positive touch they need seek it out through what she refers to as “professional touchers”: chiropractors, physical therapists, massage therapists, etc. “And some even wait in physicians’ offices for a physical examination for ailments that have no organic cause — they wait to be touched.”
Pangs of Disconnect, Morsels of Mercy
Russ Ramsey, pastor of Christ Presbyterian Church-Cool Springs in Franklin, Tennessee, and author of several books including “The Advent of the Lamb of God,” says that touching one another reminds us that we are human. “We may go through a day and shake 150 hands and it never occur to us that we shook anybody’s hand. I think that one of the benefits of [the pandemic] is that it’s roused us from a kind of a sleep when it comes to the need for community and intimacy and being known and being seen and being touched. Because when another person touches you, it reminds you that you exist.”
“Affectionate touch is how our biological systems communicate to one another that we are safe, that we are loved, and that we are not alone.”
During the past months, Ramsey has seen how reduced physical touch and human contact have played out in the lives of his congregants, particularly those who are older, single, living alone, working from home, and immunocompromised:
“It’s heartbreaking as a pastor because what I want to do is knock on my friend’s door and give him a hug … but I can’t do that.”
Even invitations to socially distanced gatherings around a firepit are met with a text response: “I just can’t.” And then radio silence.
“We’re wired as people made in the image of God to live in the context of community. Even as we’re trying to be safe and as we’re trying to love our neighbors well by practicing social distancing guidelines and good hygiene, it’s not as though we just need to suck it up. It’s that we’re missing a fundamental part of who we are as human beings,” Ramsey says.
So what is the role of pastors, small group leaders, and friends to those walking through a valley of physical and emotional detachment from the rest of the body of Christ, particularly for those who are elderly or immunocompromised?
Ramsey says gentleness and understanding are good places to start.
“Your suffering has a fence around it, and people can only enter into your suffering up to the fence. If you’re the person observing someone else’s suffering, you can go as far as you can, but not barge all the rest of the way in. The best case is when both parties go to the fence to talk.”
This “talking at the fence” means that while church friends must still remain physically distant with someone who is elderly or immunocompromised, that doesn’t mean they should keep emotionally distant.
Garner says, “The church should redouble her efforts, in whatever form [she’s] allowed, to visit the sick and the lonely. … We are in [God’s] image relational creatures. We’re not meant to be in isolation. The most feared punishment in prison or a POW camp is solitary confinement.”
Maybe it means regular video calls, meals, or flowers placed on front porches, or even good old-fashioned letters in mailboxes. Maybe it means finding creative, yet safe, ways to physically engage with those who are isolated, like Carolyn Ellis did to connect with her mother. It certainly means taking the time to remember them, in some way, even as the rest of the world moves forward toward a semblance of normalcy.
Risking Touch
But what about those who are relatively young and healthy, for whom a positive Covid test does not likely mean severe illness or death? Should they continue to hold each other at a 6-foot distance, even as they gather together in person? At what point does the risk of not physically touching one another outweigh the risk of touching?
Psychologist Brad Strawn, writing in Christianity Today, says that the “psychology of disgust” — the way of thinking that views people as contaminated because of their possession of or exposure to something we don’t want — might be contributing to a potential overreaction to Covid and a “deficit of human touch necessary for our mental health.”
He points out that the religious leaders in Jesus’ day may have been making similar overreactions:
“The Pharisees were not simply overbearing legalists but were normal humans afraid of contamination (i.e., moral impurity). Core disgust became linked to certain behaviors and people via the irrational logic of contamination and subsequently led to fear of proximity and touch.”
In contrast, Jesus was a toucher.
Strawn says that while the Jewish leaders feared coming into contact with the “unclean,” Jesus touches them right and left. While Jesus healed the sick occasionally through His words, He usually touched them — lepers, the blind and mute from His own spit, the dead, the woman with an issue of blood.
Similarly, Lore Ferguson Wilbert writes in her book “Handle with Care,” “When [Jesus] sees their distress, their utter brokenness, He doesn’t pray for them from afar or simply yell ‘be healed!’ from the other side of the room. Instead, we’re told that ‘moved with compassion, Jesus touched their eyes.’ When Jesus is undone over human suffering, He comes close, and He touches.”
While Strawn acknowledges that ritual uncleanness — like touching someone who has leprosy — is not the same thing as risking exposure to a highly contagious virus, there are parallels that ought not to be brushed past. No, it is not wise to put the vulnerable around you in jeopardy by willfully exposing yourself to a potentially life-threatening illness. But when does wise caution cross over into avoidance because of disgust of another’s potential contamination? Or, perhaps worse, have we been avoiding touch because we fearfully and idolatrously believe we have power over life and death?
At what point does the risk of not physically touching one another outweigh the risk of touching?
Strawn offers Hebrews 2:15 as the antidote: “He (Jesus) set free those who were held in slavery their entire lives by their fear of death.”
In view of this, Strawn says that the call of the church is to be wise, and also courageous. “When we remember this, we can boldly move, when the imminent danger is over, not only into our own churches but into our neighborhoods, practicing a radical hospitality. So, let’s look forward to greeting one another with a holy handshake or kiss, giving hugs, laying on hands, and anointing with oil. It is definitely worth it.”
The Feast to Come
For now, we live in the “now” and the “not yet.” Determining when this “imminent danger” is over is to a small extent an aching for the kingdom, what Paul describes as “waiting with eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God” (Romans 8:19). The questions remain: Should we touch each other? If so, when and how? Are there loved ones we will never be able to touch again in this lifetime?
Brittany Smith, RUF campus staff at the University of Arizona, writes in “Christ in the Time of Corona” that during quarantine she grieved about her separation from the students she had grown to love over coffee dates and dinners in her home. Still, the physical disconnection is instructive, she says. It provides a living metaphor for us to understand what the Apostle John describes in John 14:25-27 when Jesus promises to give the Holy Spirit to His disciples and friends after His departure from earth.
“We experience enough bodily separation from each other when our bodies die, and we move into whatever waiting period is happening before we are resurrected. But Jesus saw fit to plan a season of bodily separation from His bride. And He provides well for us in the meantime.”
She concludes, “We were given a better gift instead — His own Spirit living inside of us.”
As we walk through the tension of learning how to interact with one another in a world stricken by illness, members of the body of Christ will inevitably differ on how we believe touch ought to be ministered. Some are fully ready to rush back in with bear hugs for every person in the pew. Others have decided that it is best to remain at home and somewhat isolated for an undetermined season. Still others long to grip the hand of an aging friend but will be prevented because of plexiglass. There will be friends who see differently and will have to figure out how to move forward in spite of it. And through it all, there must be hope — that one day we will be able to touch each other warmly, purely, and fully redeemed in the kingdom that is quickly coming.
Photograph by AFP via Getty Images
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