We have a new baby and a recovering mother in the Brians house and we are all doing our darndest to both show our love to them and also to give them the space to receive the rest they need.
We also have a small cold running through the younger kids (the old sniffles + cough at night-time + mucous-y build-up thing for which kids are famous —the hanabatas). There’ve been a few days in which one or two of the kids were not able to come in and give mommy or baby a kiss.
Really hard for our one-year old (our sixth child) who does not yet speak. Really hard also for our three-year old (our fifth). And yet, between the two of them a profound imaginative difference exists. In the two years of experience that separates them my three-year old has learned the mystery of representation: a person can do something on behalf of another.
“Give baby a kiss for me.”
I kiss the baby on behalf of the sister who cannot do so. It is her kiss… and yet, somehow, by being the messenger of it, I get incorporated into their mutual affection.
Aristotle offers a lovely reflection on this kind of action: “For what we do by means of our friends, is done in a sense, by ourselves” (Ethics, III.3, cited in Milbank’s Suspended Middle).
Who gave the baby that kiss? A bad and delusional modernity would answer “the one who did the kissing” but an older and wiser way of understanding would answer, “the three-year old by way of her father.”
I think to the scene from A Knight’s Tale in which Wat, William’s friend, brings him a message from the woman William has been courting. “Give it to me” William demands. After hesitating Wat reluctantly gives William Christiana’s message: he plants a full-lipped kiss on William’s mouth.
At first William is indignant until he understands: this is Christiana’s kiss, she love him. “Oh yeah!” cries a triumphant William.
The scene would not be funny to a person from the middle ages, or at least not as funny. It is comic precisely because it plays off of the modern inability to conceive of this degree of a shared life and action —this degree of being “one” with a friend, spouse, child, servant. commander, or lover. I remember being offended on William’s behalf when I was young “Wat stole William’s kiss!” But that is not what anyone in The Knight’s Tale thinks. Christiana gave William her kiss through Wat.
Santanu Das recounts a similar scene from the battle-field of World War II: a batman (think the WWII equivalent of Samwise to Frodo) stops his officer saying “Just a moment Frank, before we go in I’ve something else to give you…” and with that he gives his commander two big kisses, one from the man’s fiancée and one from his mother (from The Kiss in History, ed Karen Harvey, p.166). The story is recounted in a letter Frank writes his fiancée precisely to tell her “I got your kiss and I miss you too” so to speak.
A third example, my mother will sometimes conclude our phone calls by telling me “kiss the kiddos for me.” And I do and I tell my kids “that’s from Tutu.” To which my kids, who haven’t yet suffered the psychic abuse of enlightenment skepticism say “tell Tutu ‘I love her.’” They know that the gestures represent the reality. They are realists in the classical sense.
This is a part of the historic Christian practice of passing the kiss of peace. I kiss my brother in Christ on the cheek and say “The Lord be with you.” As Bonhoeffer explains “Christ became our Brother in order to help us. Through him our brother has become Christ for us in the power and authority of the comission Christ has given to him” (Life Together, p.111). The Lord is with me and in me is now with my brother. We are in Christ and we each become the Kiss of the Lord to the other. It is the Lord’s kiss that the early Christian gave to the Lord’s beloved. “This kiss is from the Lord” so to speak, “here He is.”