The Touch of a God

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I was raised in the Lutheran Church. The idea that God had allowed Himself to be embodied in the form of Jesus was omnipresent. He was not merely physical, though, He was human, and He had human experiences. Thus, He “could be approached as a broken body on a cross, as a baby nursing at his mother’s breast, or as a young man embracing a friend” (29). 



I never fully grasped what this could mean because Jesus is no longer a physical presence in this world. His body was, in fact, minimized. As Protestants, the image of the crucifix, the Jesus who is in the midst of his agony, was not what we were taught to prize. Rather, we should venerate the empty cross. A pastor once said in a sermon that “Jesus isn’t on the cross anymore. Why dwell on Jesus’s suffering? What matters is that he rose again!” We were taught to see him as his spiritual self – his God self – not his human self.


In my current pagan practice, my understanding of the deities is far different. They are not completely physical. I can feel their presence in the way you might feel someone’s eyes on you, or in a shift in the room, but I don’t expect to be able to literally feel them, to touch their skin and hair or whatever it is a deity might have. That doesn’t necessarily mean that they would be unable to touch me. 


In a sort of waking dream, a tall, pale-blond man with dark eyes stood over me in bed. He reached out his hand – only one, the other stayed hidden behind his back – and set it on my chest. Then, he began to tap. First slowly, then faster, until he mimicked my heartbeat. His hand was cold and light, almost like the skin of a lizard. I was not afraid of him, but I was not filled with any sense of joy either. I had no sensation of waking up, only of suddenly being aware that I was, and that the strange man had gone.


This experience is among the more confusing to me. Seeing or hearing a spirit or deity is easy to brush off, to pretend it was just a trick of the mind. Being touched is hard to imagine. Something caused me to feel a pressure against my chest. Something caused me to feel that rhythmic tapping.



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