One of my vivid memories of childhood in a Christchurch church concerns the Sunday school anniversary – in those days, a feature of the church’s year. The guest speaker asked us children, perched up in the temporary choir-stalls, a question obviously aimed at capturing and sustaining our interest. 

“What,” asked the speaker, “is written over the entrance to the Canterbury Museum?”

Every self-respecting adult knows it is a quotation from the Book of Job: “Lo these are parts of his ways yet how little is heard of him.” But my memory of any sign at the entrance to the museum stretched no further than one baldly stating, “Keep your hands off the glass cases!” This, I enthusiastically offered as my answer to the question.

The experience came flooding back when I read Michel Strauss’s Pictures, Passions and Eye – A life at Sotheby’s. 

Strauss was, for most of his working life, head of the Impressionist and Modern Art Department of Sotheby’s. His passion for art was kindled as a child and he recalls regular visits to the Louvre in Paris with his grandmother, Marie-Louise Strauss. On one such visit in 1947, his grandmother told him it was important to actually feel the pictures and that he should touch their physical surface with the back of his little finger. 

This he did to the horror of the Louvre attendant, who rushed up shouting, “That is forbidden. You must stop him.” His grandmother, a formidable lady, curtly informed the guard that she and her husband were patrons of the Louvre and had donated many works to its galleries. The guard, recognising her, apologetically took his leave.

Strauss recalls: “Whenever paintings have passed through my hands – mostly during my professional life at Sotheby’s, I have touched the surface very lightly with the back of my index finger.” In this way, he says, “I discover all manner of information about a painting or sculpture. I can sense it value, its quality, its condition and what has been done to it over the years of its life.”

Strauss is grateful the museum’s stricture, “keep your hands off,” did not deter his grandmother from introducing him to the power and wonder of touch. 

Yet touch is more than a means to evaluating art. It is essential to our wholeness as human beings. The Gospels abound in situations where touch brings healing and wholeness. One of the most moving phrases describing the ministry of Jesus is, “He touched me.” 

Despite such biblical affirmation we are often reluctant to get too involved with touching, hugging or other forms of tactile expression. Such physical demonstrations are, with some exceptions, seen as inappropriate. 

There are, no doubt, times when physical attention is inappropriate. Nevertheless, such hesitancy easily robs us of one of God’s great gifts to humankind.

This month the Church celebrates Pentecost, the creation of God’s New Humanity. I am not a particularly mystical person and seldom, if ever, experience strange or weird mystical experiences of the Spirit. For me, the power of the Spirit comes through the support, encouragement, love and affection of others in whose lives I see the love of Christ and the graces of the Spirit at work.  

It’s simply that, as I need touch, embrace and affection to experience human community, so also I need the touch, the embrace of the Christian community if I am to experience the power of God’s Spirit and the reality of Christ’s love. 

We should not wait until we are in the presence of birth, sickness or death, or celebrating the odd special occasion before reaching out and touching others. We will be surprised at what that touch can tell us of God’s greatest artworks, other human beings.

– Tom Cadman looks at life and faith through the lens of literature