On being “touched” by God
My mother told me a story once about the angel who came to heal her in the middle of the night. He appeared at her bedside and said, “I’m going to fix your back.” He touched her, and then she felt a day’s worth of throbbing before it disappeared. After that, the lifelong ache above her tailbone never returned. In her forties, her body freed. My mother taught me the rawest form of pleasure comes from the absence of pain.
My earliest memory of her: the way my mother’s muscles seized while giving my younger brother a bath. I was…
