Richard Madeley sits in

Religious connections aside, what links my medieval prayer stone and home-baked bread? The answer is touch. Sometime during the Middle Ages someone carved the Madonna and child into this small stick-shaped stone. Think of all the people over the centuries that will have held and smoothed its surface with their fingers as they’ve prayed. And just recently I was interviewed for a programme exploring the therapeutic impact of bread-making on, among others, the victims of torture. For people whose senses have been violently assaulted the positive sensual experience of kneading dough and feeling the soft smooth, elastic texture of it in their hands can be profoundly healing. 
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Perhaps of all the senses, touch is the one we most take for granted. Only when it’s lost do we realise how much our well-being depends upon it - and that includes the experience of pain that sometimes comes with it. Violence inflicted on one person by another is wholly unacceptable, but not all pain is bad. How many of us are alive because pain let us know something was wrong and we saw a doctor? People I’ve met who suffer from leprosy became disfigured because they can’t feel pain. Without that sensation they don’t notice the nail they’ve accidentally stood on in bare feet, or their hands being burnt by pans to hot to handle. Pain, physical or psychological is there to protect us from harm – if we take note of it. C.S.Lewis wrote, ‘God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains: it is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world.’ Whether or not you believe in God, it’s worth remembering that pain requires attention and action, and no one should suffer when suffering can be alleviated.