Hands Up, Hands Down

Many years ago, I was taught that when we stand in a circle and join hands, we take a small deliberate posture.  Maybe you were taught this as well. Turn your left-hand palm up, open to receive. Turn your right-hand palm down, ready to give. We all give and take. What comes into your open left hand passes out through your right, on to the person beside you, and around it goes.

It's an easy thing to overlook - just a way of holding hands. But the posture is a whole theology in miniature.

Faith works the same way. We tend to talk about belief as though it began with us, as though we reasoned our way to it or picked it off a shelf. “I came to believe…” But honestly, none of us did. Faith was handed to us in some way. Someone or something held it out, palm down, and we took it with an open hand before we fully understood what we were holding. Every one of us is on the receiving end of something we did not start.

Paul knew this about Timothy. Writing to him, he doesn't credit Timothy's faith to Timothy. He traces it backward: "a faith that was first in your grandmother Lois, and your mother Eunice," and then in Timothy as well (2 Timothy 1:5). Three generations, one faith, passed hand to hand. Timothy's left palm was open long before he knew whose grip he was taking.

But Paul knew he couldn’t keep his hands closed around this gift. A chapter later he turns the other palm down, saying: what you have heard, "entrust to faithful people, who will be able to teach others also" (2 Timothy 2:2). Receive, then give. The faith that came to you was never meant to stop in your hands. You are a link, not an endpoint.

There's a resonance here from another tradition worth naming plainly, because it isn't scripture — it's the wisdom of the Haudenosaunee, the Iroquois Confederacy. Their people carry a principle of seven generations: that we should weigh our choices by their effect on those who come long after us. One way of holding it places you in the middle of the seven — three generations behind you, three ahead, and you standing in the current between them. It is not our text, but it brings it to light. It is the circle again: we are always receiving from those at our back and handing on to those in front, and the handing-on is the whole point of having received.

We are entering a season when this stops being a picture and becomes a practice. As we begin the school year, we hope the youngest among us will be joined and mentored by the older youth; those youth will be mentored by youth older still; and all of them are being taught by the adults, who are themselves receiving from the generations ahead of them. No one stands outside the line. Each person is someone's student and someone's mentor at once, one hand up and one hand down. It is the circle walked out among us rather than drawn on a floor: faith moving hand to hand, each of us taking it warm and passing it on.

That is what the hands are saying. We did not build the faith we stand in; we were given it, warm from someone else's hands. Lois held it out to Eunice. Eunice held it out to Timothy. Someone — a mother, a grandfather, a friend, a stranger who never knew your name — held it out to you. And now your right hand is turning down.

So, the next time you stand in that circle, notice which way your palms are facing. The left one open, still receiving. The right one turned down, already giving. You are exactly where the faith has always lived: in the passing of it, from a hand you may never see to a hand that may never know yours.

With warm hands open,

Pastor Robin