K AS KISS

The gestures of love

Boys dream of their first kiss, lovers kiss passionately, memorable kissing scenes in great sentimental films, prostitutes do not kiss their clients. St. Bernard calls the kiss, the Holy Spirit, because it realises in person the exchange of love that is in God. A sign that the kiss is a truly important gesture, capable of condensing and celebrating the best of our senses and feelings, our desires and bonds, even alluding to the heart of God!

There is something precious in the kiss, which cannot be sold out because it must be given, which must be treasured because it cannot be extorted. This is one of those profound and fundamental truths that God has written indelibly in the flesh of men and women: the gestures of love are more than the tickling of the senses, and kisses are the seal of love, not the cue for eroticism.

Illusions and delusions

Of course, one knows that the most beautiful realities are also the most vulnerable, and the most promising the most threatened. It is the same with kissing. How is it that guys can't wait to kiss, newlyweds can't even wait a minute? And how is it that kissing can be reduced to ‘Judas's kiss’ or multiply into ‘Baci Perugina’, (Italian sweets), degrade to treachery or debase into entertainment? Are we really so jealous of the gestures of intimacy?

It is necessary, in the name of true love - it is an educational operation that requires conscious and passionate adults - to redeem the kiss from the sentimental reduction and erotic devaluation that affects it today.

Consider that the most attentive scholars see in the kiss the meeting point of many details that make man and woman a marvellous being, very little like an animal (as we are made to believe today) and much more like God (as we often forget today). The upright position of man, unique among mammals, frees the hands and mouth of humans from the tasks of walking and grasping, places both faces and genitals in front of each other, thus delineating a continuity totally absent in the animal world between feeding, talking and generating! Aristotle considered significant, as a sign of the superior dignity of man, the incomparable softness, flexibility and sensitivity of the mouth, lips and tongue of humans, all organs destined for superior operations, for the work of love. Thus, on the one hand, the kiss stands in continuity with dialogue: in it, the word becomes a gesture, and communication becomes communion! On the other hand, the kiss becomes a prelude to intercourse, with which it shares the same mimicry: in it the gesture becomes intimacy, communion becomes generation!

Intimacy and its thresholds

If this is the case, then our boys and girls will have to be gently and authoritatively led to understand that kissing is a declaration, not a mere exploration, an act of love, not a lovemaking. Because the trouble with our children already on the threshold of adolescence is that loving gestures anticipate love: this creates an effect of intimacy that does not really exist. And when the taste of intimacy precedes consciousness and freedom, trouble is assured: the immediacy of the kiss risks obscuring its dignity, that of being a mediation of love.

Moreover, the very passion of love itself is at stake. To cite two witnesses not suspected of clericalism and moralism, Freud already said that “where there is taboo, there is desire”, while, Galimberti judges, in our times, where everything is permitted and everything is immediate, young people risk no longer knowing true passion, “because we have drowned it in sex, which, in body to body, cancels the distance on which passion feeds”.

One will say: it was easy, to understand and to live! Let us admit it: it is not easy, especially today, for young people who are immersed in a culture that erases thresholds, rituals and laws. Yet we must aim high, without falling into line, without becoming discouraged: young people, when they hear words of truth and find joyful witnesses, are able to understand that in the consumption of affective gestures, love is not consumed but is worn out.

Roberto Carelli SDB

(Fonte: Roberto Carelli – Alfabeto Famigliare)