Hugs and Kisses

In June Gretchen Wolff Pritchard presented at the Children’s Spirituality Conference. Her thoughts about story were very interesting. For children she suggests that we shouldn’t get bogged down with details such as learning all the ten plagues. Tell them the ten plagues happened and then move on. The details, she says, get in the way of children seeing the big picture. She also mentioned how in our visual culture children need a visual vocabulary of the faith.

So I read her book Offering the Gospel to Children. This book was written in 1992 but here is a short except about the church and children taking communion. I think it is an interesting view.

“In our family lives, we express love, forgiveness and acceptance by hugging and kissing. Hugs and kisses are the sacrament of family love. Every member of our culture knows and understands that touching a baby’s cheek with our lips and making a strange little smacking noise signifies our love and care for the baby, and our delight in him. But the baby, at birth, does not know this. He learns, quickly enough, by experience. And we start to teach him to do it too: “Kiss Mommy.” “Give Daddy a big hug.” Kissing and hugging quickly become, for the baby as well, sacramental actions – signs of love and pleasure.

Imagine if, until your child was six, you never kissed her, but only let her watch older people kissing each other. Then when she had learned to red and write (and, incidentally, had already passed the age where her imagination was most eager to grasp non-verbal experience and make it a part of her deepest self), suppose you sat her down with a special curriculum entitled “Kisses and Hugs: Signs of Love.” She would color picture of people hugging and kissing and read exemplary stories about families and answer questions about why we choose this way to express our love. Finally, on a special day, when you were sure she understood enough about hugging and kissing to e truly “read,” you would hug and kiss her for the very first time. She would wear a new party dress, and Grandma would come to lunch and bring a present, and she would feel so proud and so special.

Or would she?“

From Offering the Gospel to Children by Gretchen Wolff Pritchard, Cowley Publications, 1992. p. 160-161