C AS COMPASSION

We continue to reflect on the preciousness of gestures of love and the urgency of curbing their underselling imposed by the widespread loss of modesty, fomented by the entertainment industry and obsessively celebrated by the media universe.

Everything pushes, with regard to gestures of affection, to lose the elementary evidence that the most precious things are the most guarded and the most expensive, the most sacred and in need of sacrifice. The logic of immediate enjoyment, with its persuasive invitations to feel free, to overcome taboos, to drop inhibitions, to casually tell or scientifically explain the things of love, produces mortal wounds in the hearts of our young people.

Sexophobic Christians?

Can we Christians, who recognise in the flesh of Jesus the revelation of the face of God, who profess a God ‘born of woman’, who claim to have seen and heard, even ‘touched the Word of life’, and who with infinite gratitude know that ‘by his wounds we have been healed’? Certainly, although faith cherishes the unity of man in body and soul, we cannot deny that we have a heavy heritage behind us. Western culture believes that the most spiritual senses are sight and hearing, while faith knows a mysterious primacy of touch: the deepest experience of God does not coincide with a spiritual intuition or moral perfection, but with the Eucharistic experience; and the growth of Christian life does not consist in an overcoming of sensitivity, but in the development of spiritual senses, the ability to grasp the Lord's presence in everything, to experience the efficacy of His Word, to taste the realism and goodness of His Body!

Let us listen to Hadjadj, a French philosopher with an Arabic name, Jewish by birth and Catholic by profession of faith: ‘the deepest love implies a tactile dimension. A mother who is too contemplative would make her child sick. All the sacraments of the Church are tactile. They offer the greatest resistance to the Internet. There is no baptismal site or, contrary to popular belief, televised Mass. One cannot give absolution on telephone. Communion cannot be given through email. Imposition of hands is required. You need tongue contact. Aristotle, too, observes that it is neither sight nor hearing that distinguishes man from animals, but, paradoxically, what he shares most with them: for the other senses, indeed, man lags far behind the animals, but as for the fineness of touch he is far superior'.

In praise of the caress

Among the many gestures of love, the caress is certainly very revealing, if it prompts a director like Olmi to have one of his protagonists say: ‘all the books in the world are not worth a caress’!

The caress expresses the mystery of tenderness, which is when affection takes the soul and the body together. The name itself says it: ‘caress’ comes from ‘dear’, which in Latin means ‘flesh’, and suggests the quintessence of the loving feeling, that feeling of the other's preciousness, of the wonder and vulnerability of his or her existence, which makes us say ‘you are dear to me’, accompanying the word with the gesture of the hand.

Above all, the caress is not a simple touch, but it is contact with the untouchable. It is touching the mystery. Paradoxical: the caress touches the surface of the body, but seeks the depth of the soul. The caress does not want to define, to possess, but to bring out, to recognise. Lévinas, the great Jewish philosopher to whom we owe one of the best phenomenologies of eros, explains that ‘the caress consists in not taking possession of anything, in evoking that which continually escapes from its form’. The caress ‘does not aim at unveiling, but at searching, it is a journey into the invisible. In a certain sense it expresses love, but suffers from an inability to say it'. The truth of the caress, on closer inspection, is when sexuality and virginity are not dissociated, when the will to belong and to respect each other are one!

Fr. Roberto Carelli, SDB

(Source: Roberto Carelli - Alfabeto Famigliare)