I’ve always noticed people’s hands. I’ve always been drawn to hands and the stories they tell. When I was younger, my parents’ hands seemed very large to me. My mother’s hands: long and elegant, also strong. Hands that had to be resourceful, move quickly, figure it out. My father’s hands were different—darker, with wider fingers and a gentleness of feature but sternness of movement. The hands of someone who has held many books, turned many pages.
I remember my grandmother’s hands looking like they told a world of stories. These were the hands of a creative woman: hands that made clothing for my mother and her siblings, hands that made warm homemade bread and famed guava and coconut tarts, hands that churned fresh butter; these are the hands that turned pieces of her wedding dress into christening gowns for her children. These hands have been moving daily for 99 years this November. Though beset with pain now, they are still going.
There are other hands. My spiritual director’s hands holding mine in hers as she prays over me. The feel of her finger on my forehead when she anointed me with oil. The hands that lowered me into my baptism pool. The patient and skillful hands of the surgeon who repaired my wrist. The kind hands of the nurse who dressed me after the procedure, when I couldn’t dress myself. The devoted hands of the friend who cared for me as I recovered.
My other friends’ hands the first time I saw them holding their firstborn children. My longtime friend’s empty hands when she told me that she had lost another child to miscarriage. My first love’s hands in his casket. Looking just like I knew them to be and also telling the story that he was not there. There was no life in those hands. His living hands were not like that.
I look at my own hands and I think of every person they have held. Every face they have touched. Every person they have offered Reiki to. All the things they have carried for me. How they have worked for me over so many days, how many things they enable me to do. We love with our hands. We can use our hands for love.
Very recently, I went to Sunday service and during the beginning of Communion, I glanced up at the monitor in front of me and I saw, close-up, these gentle, brown, female hands lifting the chalice and breaking the wafer. They looked like mine. They were the hands of the Indian-American woman minister at the church. I realized that I had never seen the brown hands of a woman – hands that look just like mine – doing this sacred task. This seemingly little thing was so significant for me, in a way that I hadn’t anticipated. All day after, I kept seeing the image of her hands in my mind. Hands like mine. They were hands like mine.
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