Tender Anointings

As my friend Bob reminded me when I wrote about feasts of many colors, some of us are enjoying a feast of poetry. Each week a growing group gathers on Zoom to share poetry under the general theme of Poetry (and its healing power) in the Time of Covid with subthemes each week like Poems of Love or Poems of Nature or Poems of Animals etc. It is a most nourishing banquet of delights! 

This week’s twist is Poems of Tenderness and I confess to being obsessed. Searching for tenderness feels like searching for God.

I have not found a poem which satisfies or does justice to this most sacred word. (Though Kindness by Naomi Shihab Nye comes sooo close)

Tenderness evokes in me notions of gentleness and kindness, gesture and dance. I think of feathers and smiles, tears and the lightest touch. 

So I googled it and got a bunch of ridiculous love poems. That sounds harsh. I apologize but perhaps just too saccharine sweet. Tenderness is not always sweet. 

It may be salty or bland. It may be spicy, not too much though, just right. Tender meat is chewable. Tender skin is wounded. 

Tenderness has become for me like God, undefinable and immeasurable. Yet I have known tenderness and I have known God, never fully but always unforgettably. 

So I found myself listing tender moments. There was of course Mary of Bethany who anointed Jesus with precious nard, her supremely selfless gesture of wiping his feet with her hair only fathomable in image or music...or poem. (“She kneels at your feet again,/pours out extravagant nard,/scandalous anointing of your warm, living feet, unbinds her hair and lets it flow like water/over them, wiping them in such reckless and tender thanksgiving.” andrea skevington) Precious, reckless, scandalous...an extravagant gesture of love and gratitude.

Mary’s divine gesture led to the recollection of Jesus himself washing his disciples’ feet and I imagine the tenderness of touch, the tenderness of His eyes, the tenderness which becomes the servant song. Will you let me be your servant /let me be as Christ to you....Only singable in soft emotional tones, never booming, and only prayable in hushed whispers as we choke back tears which come from our depths of being.

Tenderness causes me to think of gentle breezes on the coast or a deer licking her fawn or the gold finch which just alighted on the thinnest of branches.

Tenderness appears in the anointing at Baptism after a less tender splashing when we gently seal our newest member with the sign of the Holy Spirit which descends in those moments in its own tenderness instead of flame.

Tenderness then says goodbye with the anointing gesture at death. Again it is the gesture of love which sends the dying to rest in tenderness perpetual.

By now you understand my tenderness dilemma which is not solvable, rather ponderable. Perhaps if I just keep remembering tender touches, tender faces, tender moments, I too will melt into tenderness and then there may be no dilemma anymore only gentle compassionate mystery. I too will feel anointed by precious breath.