A Healing Hand

By TAD BARTIMUS

While driving across miles of Midwestern interstate, the radio's hourly news breaks kept me up-to-date on how we humans can inappropriately and violently touch one another. Drownings, shootings, suicide bombings, sexual molestations -- all served up along with Top-40 hits and bad advertising jingles.

Then, pulling away from yet another fast-food drive-up window, I caught the last few phrases of a different kind of story about the power of human touch -- the kind of story I would like to find out more about.

Days later, after asking Jeeves and searching Google, I reached Sister Norma Janssen, 55, by phone at her massage therapy cottage on the grounds of the Franciscan Sisters of Illinois' headquarters, in Frankfort, Ill.

Instead of focusing on how people negatively touch one another, Sister Norma spends her Tuesdays through Saturdays massaging clients to help heal whatever ails them, to build their self-esteem, and to make them more comfortable in their own bodies.

"For someone who has suffered at the hands of another human being, it is a very brave act to submit your body to someone else's touch," said Sister Norma. "Those who come here for therapy have self-selected a place that's different from your average spa. They need to feel safe. I represent someone who can be trusted, someone who will accept their fragility, their broken-ness. Abuse is not just a physical issue, it is also a spiritual issue."

Sister Norma offers several types of massage, including Reiki and Swedish, at her order's 51-acre Portiuncula Center for Prayer (www.portc4p.com, www.fssh.com) in the Chicago suburb. Two other licensed masseuses, neither of them nuns, work with Sister Norma. They charge $55 an hour and are booked up to a year in advance. Most of their 120 or so monthly clients are repeat visitors who often introduce family members and friends to massage therapy.

Because touch is our most intimate connection, it can transport us to paradise or plummet us into hell. Just as our hearts soften when we are enfolded in a lover's embrace or when we feel an infant's fingers grasp our giant paw, not a day goes by that we don't also grapple with tragedies caused by touch. The murders of mother-to-be Laci Peterson and her unborn son; Deanna Laney's alleged killing of her sons Joshua, 8, and Luke, 6, with rocks; Andrea Yates' drowning of her five children in a bathtub -- all of these serve to remind us of how we can use our own power of touch for good or evil, the choice is up to each of us.

"You never know what you are dealing with when a new client comes," said Sister Norma. "Some women come because they are getting control of their own bodies, such as members of Overeaters Anonymous. Others have health issues. I think many physical illnesses are emotionally triggered."

"I usually begin with a prayer -- nobody has ever told me not to pray -- and then stay tuned to what they need," Sister Norma said. "Many women who have never had a massage before come to me, and I try to give them a sense of their own self-worth and dignity, so that they find out they are worth spending this money on themselves."

During nearly all of her 38 years in the Franciscan order, Sister Norma was a health care administrator who used her hands to push paper. But following her second mastectomy she turned from her high-stress job toward "a new spiritual direction."

Massage, she believes, "is sacred work. It's my ministry and I feel very privileged to be called to do this."

Sister Norma doesn't know why some humans use their sense of touch to maim, destroy and kill, but she does she does believe that a loving touch is an antidote to violent behavior. She also says we have the capacity of bringing joy with our touch to all those around us.

"Gently stroke a hand, offer to rub someone's tired feet, sooth a weary brow, kiss a child's skinned knee. We can all touch with compassion and an intent to heal. That's my way of respecting the epitome of God's creation: the human person."

© 2003 The Women Syndicate

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