One of the darkest scenes I witnessed as a counselor involved a young woman who had been so severely abused and traumatized that she was unable to talk. For days on end she had been lying in a hospital bed steadily vomiting every thirty minutes and moaning in agony. The doctors kept her hydrated, but were otherwise unable to find a physiological reason for what she was experiencing.

Somatic manifestations of mental trauma were more commonly seen in China than among clients I’ve had in the US. Sometimes the body says what the mouth is unable to express. As a young counseling intern there was little I could say or do that would be of benefit to this poor woman, yet I was sent by the lead doctor to simply sit with her and simply be present to her pain. And so we sat in a dimly lit hospital room, holding hands as she dry heaved, never once exchanging any words.

The Hebrew word for hand ‘yad’ is often used in the Bible as a metaphor for power and action. There are many verses that talk about the hand of God moving mightily to solve a problem or fix a situation. And yet, the gospel authors go out of their way to explicitly state that the hand of God was broken in the process of crucifixion. The bones were certainly smashed as the nails were driven in, the sinews and tendons were twisted. God’s hand bled.

The cross goes against everything we’ve been taught and trained for. We were told that the way of the cross increased our position, prestige and privilege. That we’d finally be good people, able to discern right from wrong and judge a situation correctly when others weren’t able to. It was subtly intimated that God loved us uniquely, even over everyone else, and that when we prayed God would answer. The hand of God would bend to our purposes and rush to provide for our every need (read: desire). This falsehood promised to increase our control and comfort, and to give us more power than we already possessed.

But at its core, the cross is about a loss of power. The mighty hand paradoxically has a hole in it.

Over the course of several days that woman and I sat in painful silence. As far as I could tell, none of my clever counseling techniques from grad school were put to use. A few days later she moved to another unit and I never saw her again. We hadn’t said more than a few words during our time. And doing nothing was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done.

When encountering the immense suffering of others, there is a tendency to want to “fix it” or “do something”. It is uncomfortable to watch others bleed. We feel totally out of control when our help is useless. Our hands, the ability to act and project power, are shattered like the hands of Christ. There is a gaping hole where our strength once resided. It takes everything within us to not pull away, to touch their wounds and experience their nails, to firmly grasp their hand and not let go.

Holding Hands