After serving for a while at the altar, communion ministers begin
to notice people’s outstretched hands: Hands that are calloused
and scarred from work. Hands that are gnarled and broken by illness.
Hands that cook, plant, build, create, paint, make music. Our hands
reveal the stories of our lives. (Jay Cormier, Give Us This Day)
Through the years I’ve often looked at my hands with amazement. I value them for such things as touching the keyboard when I’m writing, sending greeting cards of condolence, reaching around a friend to give a hug, or palms resting openly during meditation. Ah, the wonder and gift of these two simple bodily parts. A few months ago, I came across a marvelous description in Niall Williams’ Time of the Child. The following observation is from a faithful Irish doctor who tended many patients in the small village of Faha.
“He undid the beads and took her hand. For a long time now he had considered the hand one of the marvels of the human form, as individual and expressive as a face. It’s twenty-seven bones were not only a feat of engineering, but, once fleshed, were an articulation sublime, the individual communication those bones capable of attested to by the fact that no two handshakes were the same. In Faha, the hands of men and women had their world in them. They were hands swollen, sored, scarred, hands formed by weather and work, hands crooked, curved, with one finger that couldn’t be straightened or the one that couldn’t be bent, the finger that was part-tobacco, the one with the thorn embedded or nail turned amber… hands that wore history and geography, which was nothing more or less than the signature of place and your time in it.”
Our hands have their own history etched in their distinct lines and the markings that come with life’s experience and age. They’ve accompanied us through the decades as faithful servants. We probably ignore them until they remind us of their presence with some twinges of pain or stiffness. Jan Richardson’s “Here: A Blessing” refers to the stories in our hands: “But I think today is a day / for remembering / how all our history/ comes down to our hands, / how we carry the lines / that our ancestors / pressed into our palms:/ a geography of the generations / inscribed upon us like a map.” (In The Sanctuary of Women)
The month of November opens liturgically with the feast of All Saints. It’s an opportunity to be grateful for the ancestral mentors who’ve inspired us with their positive traits. In spite of all that seems wrong and wretched with the world beyond ourselves, we can find hope and joy when we gaze upon our hands and recall with astonishment what our life has been like due to these two amazing gifts. Likewise, we can gather in memory our ancestors whose courage and resilience give us reason to live life as fully and gratefully as possible. May our prayer be that of the poet Rainer Maria Rilke:
“I yearn to be held
in the great hands of your heart –
Oh, let them take me now.
Into them I place these fragments, my life,
and you, God – spend them however you want.”
Abundant peace,
Joyce Rupp
