Color Outside the Lines

“Remember the cards, you could touch the cards…” -a woman searching through a library’s electronic catalog in the 1999 movie hit “City of Angels”

Recently, a Franciscan sister I know, who also happens to be an art teacher to elementary school children, confided her disappointment in and concern for the tactile skills of her young students.

“It’s the computers,” she lamented. “They work on them as soon as they can, and by the time they get to me, it’s like they have no sense of touch. They know how to draw something on the computer, but their hands don’t know how to work with paper, paints, brushes...”

At the mention of kindergarteners working with art supplies, my memory excavates my own experience of finger painting, building log cabins of ice cream sticks, coloring clown shoes with thick, waxy black crayons, going ‘outside the lines’ and dusting most things with sparkles. These are fond, funny memories for me. It doesn’t seem that long ago, and perhaps it wasn’t, but it was long enough to precede the PC in every home.

Today’s privileged child may be able to draw (even animate or use video) while playing on their PC. But I believe they might be missing something vital. I believe it is necessary for a child to get dirty with creativity, to wear on her smock, hands and face what she has painted… to color outside the lines. As the saying goes, “A man’s reach should exceed his grasp, or what’s a heaven for?”  There’s no more obvious sign of a child’s hand exceeding his grasp than when it has taken the orange or periwinkle crayon further on the page than expected. But isn’t this journey remarkable?

Besides the motor skills that such exercises help to form and hone in the child, there is more.  The hand, and our sense of touch, is a precious gift from God that helps us to sense the world, to help and heal each other, to guide and point the way. My baby’s hands are like little stars that linger in the air, even while sleeping, as though sensing a breeze.

At an Engaged Encounter service for couples nearing marriage, the priest asked the couples to face each other. First he asked the women to place their hands in their fiancé’s. He asked the men to look at those gentle hands and began: “These are the hands that will comfort you… the hands that will teach and play with your children…”  Later he asked the couples to reverse their hands, this time the men’s hands in their fiancée’s. He addressed the women: “These are the hands that will protect you... that will cradle your child…” At the end of the service, there wasn’t a dry eye in the chapel. Even the five big guys from the Bronx were reduced to tears.  Hands are that meaningful.  We know this. God’s hands were pierced.  And God’s hand will wipe the tears from every eye.

“What’s it like?” asks the angel Cassiel of his ‘fallen’ colleague Seth in “City of Angels.”

“What?” responds Seth, who is suffering through his new humanness.

“Warmth.”

The tears roll down Seth’s face. “It’s wonderful.”