Meeting in the Margins

In her new book, Meeting in the Margins: An Invitation to Encounter Society’s Invisible People, Cynthia Trenshaw takes us with her when, as a chaplain in a Midwestern hospital room, she holds a man with AIDS who becomes her inspiration to learn massage therapy. We go with her to the San Francisco streets, homeless encampments, and shelters where she practices the art of caring touch, offering seated massage to homeless people right where she encounters them. In a private home in Washington she “massages” an amputated limb for a woman experiencing phantom pain; in a hermit’s shack on Saratoga Passage she learns about silence as she cares for a classics scholar dying of lung cancer. Not many of us go where Trenshaw dares to go. And of those who do go to the margins, few are able to express, as she does, the profound reciprocal effect that encounters of intentional presence can have.