My daughter has seduced me into learning again how to smile. I have always thought that my smile was a natural and winning one. It is shy, kind, and a bit mysterious and ironic. It is also completely useless when trying to communicate with a 9 month old baby.
Hannah’s smile is a wide open mouth stretched happily to the sides. When she smiles, one can count her emergent teeth like a dentist. It engages her entire body, which often wags in multiple directions like a caffeinated puppy. It is not subtle, or shy, and certainly not ironic.
And so I have needed to learn to smile in a way Hannah can recognize it. I can vaguely remember my smile when I was a child. It looked looked like Hannah’s: laughing eyes with a wide open mouth. My memory is distorted by my embarrassment at seeing such a smile in my childhood pictures. It felt, well, infantile. But I am beginning to recover and to welcome it. Or at least to welcome the modified, somewhat intentional and ill-fitting expression that comes when I try to evoke my childhood smile. Remembering requires practice.
Why is this remembering helpful? For very practical and grown-up reasons, we usually hide our natural reactions. With enough practice they become like my original smile, so well hidden that we never become aware of them. The extraordinary gift that the founder of the Jesuit order, Ignatius of Loyola, has given us is a method to become aware of, recognize, and welcome these inner movements so that they can then be evaluated and acted upon, modified or rejected. This is 350 years before Freud said similar things and made it sound scientific. And about 1,000 years after the Desert Father Evagrius wrote down and systematized the similar practices of the early desert elders.
Through these 10 days of the retreat we have tried to discern and follow Jesus’ admonition that we are to become like a child; to see through the eyes of a child. Yesterday we spoke of holding our sorrow and today we try to recover some childlike joy. What could this mean, and how would we do it? If we are to become like children, it might be at least in part by recognizing these childlike reactions we have buried, welcoming them all, then select those we value and practice them. This is the only way to become whole.
We have provided several exercises already in how one might do this, so I encourage you to practice looking back and forward, or walking into the Christmas story. And while you do, try to remember and practice that smile you were born with. This is the only way to become whole.