A kiss is just a kiss….
Once when banks did not have security screens, research showed that customers' perceptions of a branch's friendliness correlated highly with whether or not the bank clerk touched their hand when handing over money. However now, schools have detailed guidelines limiting as far as possible the extent to which teachers may touch children in any kind of distress and banks have screens. Peter expects Christians to greet each other physically in some way or another, but within the church, too, there is a new wariness. At a church meeting a married man hugged a woman who had recently been divorced. He was admonished because what he had done was considered inappropriate. He felt that she needed to be affirmed.
Humans need to be touched. It warms us and cheers our hearts. But today we have been betrayed into a deep self-consciousness about physical contact except within the family and in sexual encounters. We may feel we have to draw back from picking up someone else's child or hugging someone else's partner. Part of this is the reaction to new awareness of abuse. Part of it is the heightened emphasis on sexuality in so many areas of life, consumerism and culture, where we were once somewhat innocent. But the ability to make unselfconscious natural physical gestures of warmth and sympathy cannot always be recaptured easily.
How do we show everyday human love? With a kiss, as Peter suggests? We do need some guidelines, so here are a few to be going on with. Be very aware of the current cultural norms in a group where you just might kiss someone. A handshake may be coldly formal, but shaking with two hands may be just informal enough to be warm. Be very aware that you may be kissing the ones you find attractive, and leaving out the others. Better to be warm and friendly, maintaining a suitable physical gap, than be inappropriate and embarrassing. The sad thing is that where real distress calls out for touch rather than words, there we may be least able to break the new taboos.
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