Rehumanising: a hand, perhaps, to hold

A boy holding an orange in his hands

Has crossed the border in uncertainty.

He sands there, stares with marble eyes at scenes

Too desolate for him to comprehend.

Now, in this globe he’s clutching something safe,

A round assurance and a promised joy

No one shall take away. He cannot smile.

Behind him are the stones of babyhood.

Soon he will find a hand, perhaps, to hold

Or a kind face, some comfort for a while.

Lotte Kramer (1923)

It’s the word ‘perhaps’, that gives this poem its poignant pull; and how it is placed between ‘hand’ and ‘hold’, then framed in commas – the punctuation device that insists you, the reader, pause. Perhaps = uncertainty…. who knows what life will bring this boy – but perhaps, just perhaps, he has not lost the human power to imagine the better when faced with the worst.

…‘a hand, perhaps, to hold,

Or a kind face, some comfort for a while.’

Few gestures rehumanise difficult moments more powerfully than the hold, the touch, even the reaching out, of a hand. Those moments in the gospels when Jesus at the bedside of the dying child ‘took her by the hand’, or when against all advice and "good practice" he practiced goodness, reached out to the leper and ‘touched him’; and when Peter started sinking in the maelstrom of a Galilean storm Jesus ‘reached out his hand and took hold of him’. Moments of precise, intentional, kindness and comfort.

One way of rehumanising our culture would be for us to find ways of being to those who need it, "….a kind hand, perhaps, to hold….". And for the community of Jesus’ followers the challenge is to demonstrate to a culture confused about how we can touch each other in non-threatening, non-exploitative ways, how to perform acts and gestures of spontaneous and embodied kindness and comfort.

…‘a hand, perhaps, to hold,

or a kind face, some comfort for a while.’