Ode to an Ode about Hands
by Rebecca Moon Ruark
What to do with my hands at Mass now, where there is no shaking of hands at the exchange of peace?
I hold my hands tightly together, not in prayer but in futility. What's the sound of one hand clapping? That's from a Zen koan or philosophical riddle and is also a line from one of Van Morrison's songs I like to sing. I neither chop wood nor carry water with my hands, but maybe I should. I fear splinters, blisters on my hands, when there is much more to fear, again this year.
I used to gaze over my petal-fingered hands at the end of a port de bras, dancing to classical violin strains. Then, I wrote about how my hands are my mother's, long-fingered and veiny, when my grief for her was new. A mother, myself, I watched my hands hold infant sons—one arm a sling, one hand cupping the back of a downy-soft head. Later, I made a church and steeple of my hands for the toddler boys who needed entertainment in the pew. “And here's all the people,” I would whisper, wiggling my fingers.
I wrote about how my hands are my mother’s, long-fingered and veiny, when my grief for her was new.
Mostly now my hands are tools to get my thoughts on the page, tools to turn a page, to scroll and swipe. I don’t think much of this kind of mechanical touch. I think of my knee that grinds, my ankles that pop. I think of my hips, which sometimes hurt, and which I baby. I am pillow-between-my-knees-as-I-sleep years old.
Maybe I'm thinking more about my hands now because I'm washing them so often. This morning, my eighty-year-old dad called to tell me that a bit of dish-washing liquid and water works in the foaming hand-soap dispensers. Just in case the hand soap runs out. We are all worrying over scarcity and hygiene still. Praying for medical miracles—the right brand of booster, the cure. We’re all aching to begin again, clean. Wash, dry, repeat. Palmolive, he said. And I thought of those old commercials for the grass-green liquid. “Soft on hands.” Palmolive was my mother's brand. Cleanliness… Sure. But what I’m most worried about is touch. Some kind of soft on hearts. Will I remember how to touch when this is over?
One spring morning—the first of these pandemic years—over breakfast, my boys and I prayed a special one for Holy Thursday. I took little notice in how my pair of hands fits so neatly together, fingers interlocked. It took a pandemic for me to stop biting my fingernails; I noticed that.
We’re all aching to begin again, clean. Wash, dry, repeat.
Then, beginning my writing day, I flipped through poet Ross Gay's Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude and came to his “Ode to Drinking Water from My Hands.” And I could almost feel that glorious, watery touch, eternal in its scarcity.
As Gay's poem begins in a garden, you won't be surprised that on the first day of the Triduum, I had in mind another garden, Gethsemane. Maybe Gay did, too, as he quenches my poetic thirst and makes me consider hands anew, hands that become a “lagoon” and a “fountain” in his creative mind.
And I wrote. I write, like I always do, pandemic or not. Write, revise, and revise some more with these two hands, touching the keyboard. And in doing so reaching outward and diminishing the distance between my family and me, between music and me. Between God and my mom and all the angels, literary and otherwise, and me. I entreat. Maybe this work is prayer. Seeking flow and solace and creation from these two hands.
My hands make a cup I don’t want to pass me by. I don’t need a miracle. Unless a miracle is what it takes to open my hands, palms heavenward.
Rebecca Moon Ruark is a Catholic writer of nonfiction and fiction, a Mass cantor, and a kitchen dancer. She lives with her husband and twin sons in Maryland, where she is at work on a novel about the healing power of song.
