Asked what sparked my interest in downloading Michael P Foley's paper, "The Whence and Whither of the Kiss of Peace in the Roman Rite" . . .

. . . from the excellent Academia.edu site, I wrote:

That's easy. Watching my fellow worshipers at daily and week-end mass not kissing but waving and smiling at each other in a remarkable show of brush-by behavior.

(We had a priest a while back who would skip the trigger phrase, “Let us now . . .” but they sent him away.)

One can maybe catch one of these hand-wavers for a friendly smile, maybe because almost no one wants to do more than catch an eye and get on to the next one — or two or three or . . . God knows how many.

Smiling all the way.

Hands wave like, oh, reeds shaken by the wind, to use a Gospel expression. Quite a scene.

Before the priest who wouldn’t left for his new assignment, I told him I approved of the omission because it’s a distraction from worshipful behavior.

Depends what you mean by worshipful, of course, wherein lies a tale.

Enough of quoting myself, by the way, something I wrote five minutes ago as if I'd found it in a weathered manuscript. So sue me.