From the Boundary: When you’re smiling ...

There’s been so much talk about racial division, oppression and “white supremacy” from the heartland of the ‘Centre of Excellence’ these last days. If you oppose it and happen to be white, you’re labelled as being part of the problem, a white supremacist. If you’re black, you are – as they say in Nigeria – ‘black man like white man’, a quisling. It’s no-win. We must, we’re told, carry the past with us wherever we go, like a spanner in the bowels or an ice pick through the brain. But I’ll leave that for another time. For now, I’d rather talk about smiles, something we all share.

 

Imagine life without them – horrible. You see, they may even move the world. Think of Pope John Paul 1, the ‘Smiling Pope’. Of course, I’m not talking about all smiles, smiles which are really curses, forced smiles, so-called ‘English smiles’ which are really covert grimaces, or interrogators’ smiles there to fool you, or smiles of horror, fright or embarrassment, ‘tut-tut’ smiles, serial-killer smiles. No: I mean the smiles which children give – spontaneous, natural, unaffected smiles which signal pleasure, fun, affection or regard, smiles which reach through the grey skies and penetrate the humdrum. It may be a tactile gift of love which sanctifies the giver and blesses the recipient. It lives, this smile, in the vagaries of highs and lows, danger and confusion. With fun and laughter it opens the door to the joy of life in a world which is all too often ‘kill-joy’. It’s the kind of smile which causes us to say to someone: ‘Gosh, you made my day’.

 

Sometimes it seems as if we Christians are expected to go around with long faces because fun is just a cover for sin, and that we must be degenerates if we’re not perpetually looking down our noses and censoring this or that, him or her. I wonder how many smiles we give and receive in a day. Maybe it’s worth counting them. A ‘smile count’ might just tell us the kind of people we are.

 

For many, the world seems such a lonely and friendless place. At times, it seems indifferent, even hostile, a world where people talk but don’t really say anything, or hear but don’t really listen. And increasingly for so many the world is THEIRS to the exclusion of everyone else. It’s a world which has only ME at its centre. That’s sad, isn’t it? It misses the point that ultimately we can’t survive without each other and that, whether we realise it or not, we all cook and warm ourselves before the same fire – one world, one humanity. Moreover, I derive so much of whom I am from who you are. We are not Desert Fathers or Trappist monks. We move in relationship in the world – and so often make a mess of it.

 

That’s the wonderful thing about smiles. They draw us together day-by-day, and it doesn’t matter whether you’re a saint or a sinner, a beggar or a rich man. With smiles, there’s giving and receiving in the ordinary. As we smile to each other we become visitors and hosts to each other. There’s a shared hospitality – philoxenia. In its openness, there’s no fear that one or other may become parasites. We never come that close in the daily course of things. But what there is, as we exchange our smiles, is a naturalness, a kindness, an open-endedness. It’s a process which remarks a reverence for life, and so has a deeply spiritual dimension. Indeed, the smile of the moment may be God sent and work its way as rose petals of blessings which signal renewal and resurrection.

 

The blessed smile touches all social conventions and classes. Race, colour, age, gender, orientation are irrelevant. Natural smiles know nothing of calculation, expectation or demand, and their fruits are free-spirited. They signal so much of what makes life worth living and are a wonderful antidote to loneliness.

 Do you understand, then, why I detest and reject the language of ‘supremacy’ which contrives to turn one man against another in this world of NOW? The smile draws us together as brothers and sisters. And if by a quirk of birth I am oyibo – a white man – let me tell the ‘professional historians’, those leg spinners whose googlies are all far too predictable, that in sowing discord between those who live in peace upon this planet they make themselves very small despite all the bullying and bombast, the preening and posturing.

 

For me, the smile proclaims a spirituality of oneness, a Gospel which scythes down all the bitterness and hatred. It’s an administration of Jesus in the highways of the world and brings with it all the wonders of the Kingdom.

 

Today I shared smiles with the postman, the girl in the pet shop, Denell – my As Good as it Gets ‘Carol the Waitress’ – in the coffee shop at Cave Shepherd and many more, not least and down the telephone my UK mulatto kids, who are more precious to me than ‘truth’. What an odd word ‘mulatto’ has become, paradoxically associated with both ‘supremacy’ and the ‘second rate’.

 

In all of this we exhibit our truest selves. With our smiles we reach out to each other and celebrate an instinctive act of love. It’s what the ancients called Philia, the love of the affections, which ever resonates as a ‘holy touching’ in all the rough roads of our lives. So there – keep on smiling and let the sun shine through.

Go safely then – until the next time.

 

Gospel from the boundary: “I prefer a Church which is bruised, hurting and dirty because it has been out on the streets, rather than a Church which is unhealthy from being confined … clinging to its own security … caught up in a web of obsessions and procedures” (Pope Francis).