Blog 3655 – 11.06.2025
Loves and Kisses
In the Greek there are three words for love that correspond to family or brotherly love, erotic or sexual love, and agape or love in it’s highest form.
None will deny that love in all three of the above expressions is indeed a wonderful thing. And that as the ole rock ‘n role song says, “Even a bad love is better than no love at all” or as an old English poet perhaps said better, “That it is better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.”
Today, I would like to describe three kisses that go with the three loves. First the family kiss. There is little sweeter than a mother kissing her baby, or a father his child. Kissing cousins or brothers and sisters is perhaps in much of Western culture viewed a little less so. The French still kiss both cheeks as a term of endearment, but we will speak more of French kissing later. I recall a scene from Back To The Future where Marty’s teenaged mom kisses him not knowing that he is her son and says, “It’s like kissing my brother.”
The second kiss, the romantic, erotic, or sexual kiss is the one of which it is said, “A kiss is an upper persuasion for a lower invasion.” Such kissing between consensual adults, or the same age young adults, is a primary contributor to population growth that brings about all that familial love. French kissing though condemned by some religious conservatives and warned against by some in the medical profession is, I think, one of the two best things the French ever gave us and I am not referring to French Fries, but all those lovely French ladies like Josephine Baker and Brigette Bardot, to name but two. All those millions of French men can’t be wrong.
Lastly there is the highest form of love, agape, divine, or the love that comes to us from our higher best self. The Indians, not the feathered, but the red dot kind, wear that red dot I am told to symbolize the divine kiss. In one of my all-time favorite books, Stranger In A Strange Land, by Robert Heinlein, the founder of a religious cult that is taken over by the Man from Mars, the Prophet Foster is purported to bless his followers with Foster’s Kiss, a red lips imprint mark on their bodies.
I believe we all have such a mark, perhaps not as visible as a red dot or red lipstick imprint, but we are each of us loved and bear the kiss of our higher best self. Only foolish ego or some other puppet master would deny that eternal and undeniable fact.
In the New Testament Bible story, in at least one version, Jesus was betrayed by a kiss. Some have speculated that Judas was merely trying to force Jesus to reveal who he truly was. A kiss can do that for us if we allow it to, a kiss can reveal Who and Whose we truly are. And that, my friends, is a kiss to build a dream on.
Your friend and fellow traveler,
David James White
Louis Armstrong – A Kiss to Build a Dream On
theencouragingword 