Jenny kiss’d me when we met, / Jumping from the chair she sat in; / Time, you thief, who love to get / Sweets into your list, put that in! / Say I’m weary, say I’m sad, / Say that health and wealth have miss’d me, / Say I’m growing old, but add, / Jenny kiss’d me.
That’s the only poem (written by Leigh Hunt, 1784-1859) that I remember from my high school literature course. I wonder why? Maybe because it was playful, lighter than the longer doleful stuff we had to read. I mean it captured the delight of being surprised by a kiss, that directness beyond words – such that it erases from your mind all your preoccupations and you think, “ Gee, somebody likes me enough to get right to the point!” I think I was introduced to kissing at a birthday party when I was seven years old. Actually the party was more an occasion for older siblings and adults to have fun with us. And so I was told I had a letter waiting for me at the post office (in the home’s vestibule); I entered and there was Alice Lyman looking as shy as I. To break the spell we finally gave each other a peck and she giggled her way back to the parlor – while I got to thinking, “You know, that wasn’t bad! I hope I get another letter.”
Kissing! Do you remember the 1990 movie “Cinema Paradiso”? It’s about a fellow named Salvatore recalling his boyhood in a Sicilian village where the only cinema was the parish hall and the pastor previewed every film and had the projectionist Alfredo edit out all the kissing scenes before showing it to the public. It tells of Salvatore’s fascination with movies and of his friendship with Alfredo who taught him how to operate the projector and splice film. And now the adult Salvatore is on his way back to the village to attend Alfredo’s funeral and finds Alfredo has left him a legacy – a montage of every kissing scene he had edited out of those old films, so that as Salvatore watched it, “tears came to his eyes”. The kiss! That most human of human gestures, capturing the essence of what makes us human, namely affection, spiritual as much as incarnational solidarity, love. The mouth used not for words but for the “thing itself” – beyond the inadequacy of words.
Before swinging into the chorus of “As Time Goes By”, the composer Herman Hupfeld wrote the following prelude: This day and age we’re living in / Gives cause for apprehension / With speed and new invention / And things like fourth dimension. // Yet we get a trifle weary / With Mr. Einstein’s theory, . . . // And no matter what the progress / Or what may yet be proved / The simple facts of life are such / They cannot be removed.
And then comes that famous chorus: You must remember this / A kiss is still a kiss . . . . / The fundamental things apply / As time goes by. The kiss as a fundamental expression (when genuine) of personal affection, of reverence, of love – which is why we have incorporated the kiss into our liturgical life. We kiss the Gospel book, the celebrant kisses the altar. We bestow upon each other the sign of peace (which we once called the kiss of peace) to get past the pleasantries and repression behind which we too often conceal our needy, true and aching selves.
And now I recall that scene in Dostoyevsky wherein, after having silently listened to an interminable reprimand by the Grand Inquisitor repressisng everything Christ stood for, what does Christ do? He doesn’t say a word. “He suddenly approached the old man and kissed him gently on his bloodless, aged lips. That was all his answer.” Have you been kissed by Christ, by God? You have, you know. It may take you some time to realize it – but that’s what the Church’s doctrine of Grace is all about.