What is it about the smile, the human smile? Well, only humans smile—there is no dog smile, cat smile or crocodile smile.
When a human babe is newborn its eyes are closed, its face blank, serene, sleepy, unearthly—where is that consciousness hiding, is it really a living human soul, my daughter, my son, human fruit of my loins? When will it ever wake up and show itself to me?—please wake up, I want to see you, to know you, O soul that I have made, who will be utterly mine, and me thine, perfectly forever.
Then suddenly, inexplicably, the serene, angelic physog is filled with a pained pang to be fed, the little face scrunches up, turns code red angry, outraged, total existential crisis mode, feed me or I’ll die and it’ll be your fault, you don’t love me, it screams, it commands. Blip—human facial expression number one? Yes, it has the signature dual nature—both expression of inner feeling, and signal to the world—but no, it’s not human, not uniquely human—it’s the instinctive, biological, animal nature of the child bursting through—life always has to survive first, after all, obviously.
What do we do to awaken the consciousness of the little babe, to experience and confirm its longed-for humanness—we mothers and fathers, siblings, grandparents, other interested parties? Well, we talk to it, sing to it, hum to it, canoodle to it; and above all, whenever the angel eyes open even just for a split second, what do we do?—we smile at it! We smother it in smiles—“come on, my little darling, I know you’re in there somewhere, show yourself to me!” And then and then and then, yes, yes, she smiled back at me, I’m sure she did, it was definitely a smile—just for a fleeting second—“O my darling, you truly are there”. Pretty soon the smiles flow thick and fast, and true humanness begins.
The smile is the true and original indicator of humanness, the fundamental unit of human communication. It has this dual nature—as I said, both expression of inner feeling, and signal to the world—I smile therefore I am! But what is that feeling expressed, that signal sent? Remember, the smile comes only to the child via outside intervention, from the very interested party outside of it, mummy or daddy, or big bro. It will never learn to smile otherwise, I confidently suspect. When we smile, child or adult, any of us, anywhere on the planet—what is it? what is it? What do we express, what do we say to the world?
This is what we express: I, myself, feel, inside me, real peace, wellbeing—in that moment—which is connection, oneness, harmony, union with you, the world!! Even when we just smile to ourselves, we don’t just smile to ourselves, we smile to the world—it’s just that no other human happens to be looking right then. A smile is a signal, a message, spontaneous, welling up from deep inside—”I love you (the world), you (the world) love me”.
So there you have it, ladies and gentlemen—“Smile Theology”—for what is the world that we would love it and it love us?—that we would smile at it, and it would smile back at us? Not a mere jumble of random, heartless matter—how could that possibly smile, or love? No, a living, vital, grace-filled cosmos—an everything-outside-of-us, our parents its first emissary, which we might eventually recognize, and know, as the great and true one-God of love. We, each of us, therefore, are the little babe—then God first smiles at us—and that’s where all the smiling begins.
November 2022