I sat comfortably at the Hollow Square conference table in my usual back left-hand corner position, focused and ready to take notes. The presenter, an older gentleman in a suit with a bow tie, queued up music and began a slide show. The track was Nat King Cole’s version of Mona Lisa, a song written in 1949 by Ray Evans and Jay Livingston and covered by many wonderful artists over the years. The slide show was a plethora of then current magazine ads for all sorts of products featuring that famous face and smile. He didn’t say anything during the next 2 ½ minutes, just let the audio/visual play. I don’t remember his presentation topic or what any of this had to do with it, but I’ve never forgotten the introduction. And, Cole’s version of this song is still my favorite.
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This song refers to that famous smile as “mystical”. As it happens, enigmatic facial expressions – especially smiles – are something of a trademark of the artist, Leanardo Da Vinci. Yet this particular smile has sparked hot debate for nearly five hundred years. There are many, many words that have been used to describe it, uttered by perhaps none more famous than Michelangelo who was intrigued and called it an “ironic” smile. The Italians have a word to explain the technique used to paint Mona Lisa's smile: sfumato. It means blurry or smoky. Other adjectives used for half-a-millennia include: sly, sublime, enticing, mysterious, enigmatic, contemplative, repellent, witty, elusive, scornful, eerie, deceptive, neutral, magnetic, sensual, remote, flickering, sweet, all-wise, strange, tempting, bemusing, fading, lovely, curious and cold. Giorgio Vasari, one of Da Vinci's biographers, wrote that while Leonardo painted, he employed singers and musicians to keep Madam Lisa amused so her face would not show the melancholy painters often give to portraits. Said he: "and in this portrait, there is so pleasing an expression, and a smile so sweet, that while looking at it one thinks it rather divine than human." These memories all came flooding back to me in my meditation this morning, as I wondered: if all this for the smile of a woman who sat for a portrait 500 years ago, what words would we use to describe the smile of God? What does that smile even look like? We all hold within ourselves the smile of God. Finding the right words to describe what it looks like might just be futile. We rarely see what our own genuine smile looks like (it’s different than that reflection we see when we force a smile looking into a mirror) so we cannot attribute the words to describe what others may see. More important than finding the right words to adequately describe the smile of God is to find the feelings that trigger it and to understand how those feelings drive the behaviors by which it shines for others to see. What are these sentiments, these feelings, these behaviors that trigger that smile of God that is within each of us? Ah, that’s for each of us to find for ourselves. Here’s a partial list to jump start your thinking: Kindness. Compassion. Caring. Consideration. Love. Presence. Listening. Understanding. Empathy. Forgiveness. Mercy. Gratitude. Grace. Calmness. Courtesy. Appreciation. Respect. Generosity. Tolerance. Still curious about just what that smile of God looks like? It’s often visible on the faces of strangers, mostly women, when they see a baby whom they don’t know. (When they know the baby, their expression becomes more animated.) It’s such a natural, human and automatic response. Watch for it. Don’t get distracted looking at the baby. Now look at the eyes of the person smiling and you will see the other and perhaps more important part of a genuine smile reflected there - what the French anatomist Guillaume Duchenne referred to as the “sweet emotions of the soul”. When you can see that, you are witnessing the smile of God. So, just like the Mona Lisa painting, to really see the smile, you have to look at her eyes. |