Table Talk: Meditations on Massage

     Mom passed on a bit of Jewish wisdom. “In the old days,” she told me, “a rabbi learned a trade as well as to be a religious leader and teacher.” She repeated the information several times as I was preparing to study religion and practice ministry. I assumed she was talking about rabbis, while she was advising me in her typically oblique style. I didn’t take the hint. So at age fifty, as I considered leaving congregational ministry, I had no trade to fall back on as a way to make a living, no interest in other kinds of church work, and no desire for another profession. 

     My situation was complicated by my recent separation from my wife of many years. We had irreconcilable differences; at least we couldn’t see our way to solve them. The separation was amiable although not without anger, sadness, and stress. Thoughtful, moody, elated, and a little unsure, I was making my way into a new life of relationships and vocation.

     I felt unprepared to switch to some other kind of work. I wanted to find a job that would allow me time and energy to write and do artwork. Nothing seemed quite right. From the organizations to which I applied for jobs, I got polite rejections. But in my daily perusal of want ads, I kept stopping to read ads for massage schools. "What a kick that would be," I thought. I could work part-time as a massage therapist and still do the other projects. Friends who wondered if I was falling apart might be relieved to know I was at least going to school.

     So I enrolled in massage school to learn the skill I should have mastered in response to my mother hints. Immediately I was intrigued by the diversity of my classmates. They included nurses, a physical therapist, teachers, a recreation director, an office administrator, a computer specialist, and others, whose work I could not quite determine. One student had studied bug science, another physical education; several had not completed high school. We ranged in age from seventeen to fifty-four. Two students claimed to have come to earth in some distant past from other galaxies, and I could almost believe them, given their distinctive perspectives and personalities. Although I had spent much of my life hanging around with artists and musicians, most of them had been related to the church and, as colorful as their lives seemed, they paled when compared to the lives of this new group of students and friends.

     Care-giving practices and values developed during many years of ministry extended into my new work. I knew how to listen to my clients who sometimes unveiled troubling aspects of their lives. I took them and their perspectives seriously. But now, rather than the church, massage therapy became the subject of my meditation; its practice, my daily discipline. I began to contemplate the human body as the occasion of divine communication.

     I found Christian teachings and images useful to me as I gave and wrote about massages. I thought about how the body is so often perceived in the church’s theology, how its urges often have been called the enemy, and how it has been degraded as dying flesh. I gained insights into biblical stories as I realized my work sometimes mimicked the actions of ancient healers. And I started thinking about biblical and canonical saints and appropriated them as symbols for the nurturing and healing work of massage therapy.

     My volunteer work at Colorado AIDS Project invited an additional level of reflection. I came to appreciate massage therapy in relationship with matters of death as well as matters of life. Giving massages to chronically or terminally ill persons has provided a perspective that seems helpful to my clients and sustaining to me as one who works with them in the extremity of their illness.

     Some people are surprised by the idea, but I now consider bodywork to be not only my trade, but also my ministerial practice. The stories I will present in weeks to come try to express how this is so. Perhaps the correlation of Christian and massage images may be as helpful to others as they have been to me.

A shaman ran by, painting by Phillip Hoyle

In its focus on healing, bodywork seems to me more
 closely aligned with the work of shamans rather than ministers.
Still, ministers do engage in healing work, but in my experience it arose
in connection with hospital ministry and sometimes counseling.
I learned enough in such work to help prepare me for this hands-on work.
My understanding of my massage work mixes Christian and other images 

in my mind and practice.