Touching Forever
Written by Virgil Tipton
Buried in a musty cardboard box—under a stack of letters, postcards, books, and old bank statements—I found a photo created by a little miracle of timing. My siblings and I believe it may show our parents’ first touch. My mother told us a story years ago about meeting the man who would be our father. They were both guests at a party at a mutual friend’s lakeside house. Swimming in the lake, Mom felt a fish brush past her leg. Startled, she reached out for the nearest person, thinking it was her sister. It wasn’t. It was the man who would shyly propose to her a few months later.
The photo shows my mother reaching toward my father’s back, exactly as she described the moment in her stories. On the back of the picture, in my mom’s handwriting, is a date and note that this was when they first met. We can’t ask for more details. We found the photo after both of our parents had died. Of all the photos I have of my parents, this is the one I love the most. I know where it is, and I protect it.
That brings me, in a roundabout way, to the theme of this month’s Liguorian: Relics. Many people struggle with the practice of venerating relics. It strikes many people, even devout Catholics, as curious, or more archeological than religious—or even faintly pagan. I have mixed feelings about relics of saints, especially what are called first-degree relics: parts of a saint’s body. But then I think of that photograph. And my father’s ties and his watches and drawings. And my mom’s books and her jewelry. My parents aren’t saints, and I don’t venerate their belongings. But these objects certainly make me feel closer to them.
It’s that powerful yearning that lies behind the veneration of relics. We may be separated in time from our loved ones—or from saints—but we can be connected to them in some way by seeing and touching the things they saw and touched. Thus, relics and loved ones’ belongings hold measures of both delight and poignancy. We may know the full story of these objects, or we may sense only a shadow. They connect us to something lost and something that lasts forever. 