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I am certain that almost all listeners will have heard of the Nobel Prizes. But what about the Ig Nobel Prizes? They celebrate seemingly silly but inventive and thought-provoking scientific research. Among the winners at last week’s ceremony were US academics whose analysis suggested that, when left alone, upper-class people took twice as many sweets from a child’s candy-jar than their lower-class peers. However, my favourite winners were the Oxford biologists who looked into the evolution of kissing. They came up with a scientific definition of intimate kissing as, “non-agonistic interactions involving directed, intraspecific oral-oral contact with some movement of the lips or mouthparts and no food transfer.” It is easy to laugh, but definitions are often necessary for scientific research. However, thankfully, they don’t explain away religious, social, and cultural meanings. A kiss is, I think, so much more than any definition. In the classic movie Cinema Paradiso, set in post-war Italy, romantic films shown in the local cinema have their kisses censored out by the local priest on morality grounds. However, the projectionist secretly keeps them and splices them together into a show reel. At the film’s end, set decades later, we see those kisses when the reel is found and played for the first time. Every time I watch it, I weep like a baby as dozens of loving kisses unfold on the screen. Kisses are dangerous and risky too. Jesus himself was famously betrayed by a kiss. Judas used the then established greeting between close friends and turns it to the bad. Caravaggio’s famous painting of the scene, The Taking of Christ, brings out the sheer vileness of Judas’s actions by setting it in deep shadow and cramping Jesus’s personal space. It is a reminder, if one were needed, that there are few things more unwelcome than an unwanted kiss. The Bible, nonetheless, suggests that when Christians meet one another they should do so with a kiss. For a very straight-laced Brit like me, that is an uncomfortable suggestion, though my French sister-in-law has got me to the point where I share ‘la bise’ with her when we meet. St Paul called the Christian greeting a ‘holy kiss’. I think he wanted to indicate that such kisses model the love, trust, and tenderness found at the heart of God. They are not shaped around intrusion or uneven power relationships, but an equality of respect between those who bear the image of God. I think the definition of kissing offered by the Oxford biologists might aid scientific understanding. But I am glad that a kiss represents much more. For me, it is a signal that love, intimacy, and friendship flow directly from God.
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