Today we celebrate the incarnation of love in the person of Jesus of Nazareth.

In verse 1 of the prologue to his Gospel, the Evangelist John famously writes:

In the beginning was the Word
and the Word was with God
and the Word was God.

The Greek word typically translated into English as Word in John 1:1 is logos, which in other disciplines (e.g. rhetoric and philosophy) was variously translated as mind, reason, principle, ground, plan, word, speech, and discourse. It was used in ancient Greek philosophy and early Christian theology to refer to the Divine reason inherent in creation, the ordering principle of the cosmos.

A bit later in verse 14 John continues:

In Jesus, heaven and earth touch. Jesus is the kiss of God.

Never before has the enfleshment of God in Jesus made more of an impact on me than these last two Christmases when the Covid-19 pandemic and more recently the Omicron variant ravaged and raged in our midst keeping family and friends and communities apart. Never before in our lifetime has human touch been missing more, causing us to yearn even more intensely for tender touch, affectionate, loving, and YES saving touch.

Into this twenty-first century on the planet earth Jesus is born again in our midst as the Word made flesh. The logos of God, the Word, mind, reason, ordering principle manifests as the reaching out of the Divine toward the Not-God so that all the earth might know and feel and experience the touch that enlivens, comforts, reassures, and saves us from the pandemic of aloneness, desolation, alienation, and estrangement.

Recently I read a short essay titled “Frederick’s Experiment.” It begins in this way:

Back in the thirteenth century, the German king, Frederick II, conducted a diabolical experiment intended to discover what language children would naturally grow up to speak if never spoken to.

He thought it would be German. Some things are just obvious, right?

So King Frederick took babies from their mothers at birth and placed them in the care of nurses who were forbidden to speak in their hearing. But a second rule was imposed, as well: the nurses were not allowed to touch the infants. To his great dismay, Frederick’s experiment was cut short, but not before something tragically significant regarding human nature was revealed. As you may have guessed, the babies grew up to speak no language at all because they died.

In the year 1248, an Italian historian named Salimbene di Adam recorded, with an air of scientific observation, “They could not live without petting.” The babies literally died for want of touch.1

Touch is a means of communication so critical to human life that its absence can be fatal. Through modern and more recent studies than Frederick’s Experiment and subsequent accidental discovery, research shows that the absence of human touch retards growth in infants. Skin-to-skin time in the first hour after birth helps regulate babies’ temperature, heart rate, and breathing, and helps them cry less. Lack of human touch results in what modern scientists call the “failure to thrive.”

In his best-seller Love and Survival, Dr. Dean Ornish emphasizes the requisite place of love and intimacy in human life. No one has yet been able to scientifically explain why love and intimacy are necessary not merely for humans to thrive but for humans to survive.

How poignant this is on this Holiest of Days when we celebrate the Grand gesture of Emmanuel—GOD-WITH-US—in these days when conditions are such that for a time the absence or limitation of human touch is necessary to prevent even more deaths. How conscious are the loved ones of the millions who have died in hospital rooms without receiving their final loving, comforting touch. How much sense the paradoxical sacred subterfuge of the incarnation now makes so that we might know forever the intimate petting of God.

In and through Jesus we experience the skin-to-skin love of the Divine. Jesus is the light touch of God that leaves an indelible mark. What the scientists can’t explain the mystics knew well: touch is essential for life and required for human flourishing. It is an awareness and knowledge born of love and it is a love not only enacted but enfleshed. Our very being here is the result of a labor of love, by Love, for the sake of love. Jesus is the living reminder of this for a forgetful people.

The Gospel writers and the mystics taught that we are made to be loved. And the reign of God is rooted in the Divine vision, woven into the ordering principle of the cosmos, so that those who are humble enough to see and wise enough to know realize in the embodied love of Jesus that Love evokes love. “Hodie, Christus natus est!” Yes, today Christ is born! But if Christ is to be born tomorrow and then born again and again and again, it is up to us to give him some skin.

Goodpeople, may you experience, know, and feel
the intimate touch of God today
and allow God to touch others through you.
Christmas Joy Be Yours, Dan

1 https://www.digma.com/digma-images/video-scripts/fredericks_experiment.pdf

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