On Smudging

and the purification of the Church

Tony Blicq (private collection/personal photo)

---

Questions were raised about the smudging that accompanied the papal visit to Canada.  I can't shed much light on that. Smudging is an ancient pagan sacramental with no very precise meaning, so far as I can tell, beyond bidding "negative energy" depart so that men may be at peace. What this energy is and how exactly it is banished, other than by good intentions or wishful thinking, I don't know. It is all rather obscure to me, though perhaps a good psychological or sociological account of its use in this or that culture can be given. A good spiritual account is another matter, and here it must be said that the spiritually obscure is also the spiritually dangerous. Sacramentals can serve to hide, as much as to hallow, the truth. They can even corrupt or pervert it, should they stray, as they may, into support for idolatry.

As one who attends a traditional Mass, I've no objection to the wafting of ceremonial incense. But in the Mass those obscuring clouds are parted by luminous psalms and prayers that leave one in no doubt about what is happening and why it is happening. It is all about the holiness of God and the power of his saving acts. It is about being placed in situ with Isaiah, after the death of the great king, Uzziah, who presumed to worship God on his own terms and was struck with leprosy for his trouble, or rather for his hubris. The divine point is driven home to Isaiah in a vision:

In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord sitting on a throne, high and lofty; and the hem of his robe filled the temple. Seraphs were in attendance above him; each had six wings: with two they covered their faces, and with two they covered their feet, and with two they flew. And one called to another and said: “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts; the whole earth is full of his glory.” The pivots on the thresholds shook at the voices of those who called, and the house filled with smoke. And I said: “Woe is me! I am lost, for I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips; yet my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts!” Then one of the seraphs flew to me, holding a live coal that had been taken from the altar with a pair of tongs. The seraph touched my mouth with it and said: “Now that this has touched your lips, your guilt has departed and your sin is blotted out.” 

The Mass is a sacrament, to which incense is obviously a fitting sacramental. Smudging, on the other hand, is a sacramental sans sacrament. In the former, the glory of God is revealed; the darkness of sin is thus disclosed and purged; alienation is really and truly overcome. In the latter, alienation—not of man from God but of man from man—is acknowledged in some vague fashion, and equally vaguely willed away. If ritual smudging, as signum, has any corresponding res, that res can only be found in the Mass. Which helps explain why so many indigenous people, whether smudgers or not, came to embrace Catholicism.

This they did through the labours of generous and determined missionaries such as St François de Laval, who went out among them with the gospel of atonement, seeking to reconcile man to God and man to man. "Who will go for us?” asks the LORD. “Here am I; send me!" replies Isaiah. That was Laval’s answer also. He belonged to an old and illustrious family whose fifth-century patriarch had been baptized alongside Clovis, King of the Francs. When his two older brothers died in the war ravaging Europe, he inherited the family title and the Montmorency estate. Despite the pleadings of his mother, however, he left it all behind and set out for New France in 1659, just a decade after the martyrdom of St Jean de Brébeuf.

It was through the self-sacrifice of Brébeuf and his companions, who had determined to live and die among the Huron, becoming all things to them so that by all means they might save some, that a beachhead was made in North America for the gospel of Jesus Christ. Their martyrdom (by the Iroquois not the Huron) was not pretty. It is said that, after mock baptisms with scalding water and other such tortures, their lips were not only purged but cut off, in penalty for the audacity of their preaching. But in the end that preaching prevailed, through the manifest love with which they lived and died. What the Huron had doubted, and the Iroquois sought to eradicate, by severe mercies took wing and conquered a continent. Atonement was made and sins were blotted out, as indigenous people converted to Christ and became saints themselves, with the sign of the cross smudged on their foreheads and in their hearts.

Laval was trained by the Jesuits. Brébeuf and confrères were Jesuits. The Jesuit order being imbued today with a rather different spirit, however, we should not be too surprised that the one and only Jesuit pope should come to Canada and make no appeal to the martyrdoms on which the Catholic mission here was founded. Those historic lines were “smudged” in the more prosaic sense of the word, though ignoring Brébeuf (and the Martyrs’ Shrine) in Canada is on a par with ignoring St Denis in France.

Now, there can be no doubt that, in the residential school era, the principles on which Brébeuf had worked were to a certain extent reversed. For secular authorities, naturally, it was not a matter of becoming all things to the natives, but rather of requiring the natives to become all things to those who were newly colonizing the continent. Among those who effected that unhappy reversal, alas, were also to be found members of religious orders tasked with conducting missions and overseeing Catholic institutions. Sins were committed against indigenous peoples, some of them systemic and others very particular, for which attempts at atonement are still being made. Hence the papal visit.

But even those lines were smudged. Not only because the particulars were generally passed over—to deal with particulars one has to deal in facts, not in allegations, a messy business—but because all that is only half the truth: half the truth about the history of the church in the New World, and less than half the truth about the era in question, an era in which many Catholics continued to labour in the spirit of Brébeuf and many indigenous Christians were Christians gladly, and partners in the mission. Of this the Truth and Reconciliation Commission took little notice, and too little effort was made in the papal visit to correct its omission.

One is tempted (for its sins of omission) to refer to the TRC as the TRO. That would be a decidedly undiplomatic gesture, of course, but there are difficulties in the present climate which mere diplomacy cannot address. Today anti-Christian fanatics, willfully ignorant of the facts, burn native churches and are excused or even lauded for such enthusiastic expressions of negative energy. It seems, indeed, that the more we hear about “truth and reconciliation” the less of it we actually see. What was it Isaiah was told to say when he went out to speak to the people on behalf of God? "Keep listening, but do not comprehend; keep looking, but do not understand."

 Make the mind of this people dull,
    and stop their ears,
    and shut their eyes,
so that they may not look with their eyes,
    and listen with their ears,
and comprehend with their minds,
    and turn and be healed.

The church, however, should look first to its own affairs. The painting pictured above, by my late friend (of curiously syncretistic faith) Tony Blicq, captures my own feelings about the state of things at present. It was produced in his winter studio on a Greek island, where it languished somehow incomplete in the eye of its creator until the Easter vigil rolled round. Having ascended from that vigil to his rented house, carrying in his hand (like every other villager returning home) a still-burning candle, inspiration struck. Turning the canvas over, resting it upside down between two trestles, he lay on the floor and smudged into it, with smoke from his candle, the sign of the cross, before adding in the lower left quadrant the scribbled blackness to which the cross answers.

The effect, to my eye, is at once melancholy and hopeful, mournful and invigorating. It conveys a message we sorely need to hear, as if we were hearing again the words of Isaiah: “Woe is me! I am lost, for I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips; yet my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts!”

Now the church in the painting is not the parish church but, like many others in that part of the world, what we might call a private chapel. Which invites the remark that some people (including very highly placed people) treat the church as a private possession, of which they may make what they will, as and when they will. Others think of it as just another political object on the canvas of a political landscape, which is the only landscape they know. Still others treat it with disdain, or even with passionate hatred, making it a scapegoat for their own sins. But the church, however men regard or treat it, remains the church of Jesus Christ. It stands under the sign of his cross, that sign of contradiction which, with startling clarity, testifies to every man's need for the very real, the very costly, the uniquely efficacious act of atonement that he accomplished.

What is the mission of the church but to bear witness to this act in every nation and among every people, and to transmit, through the sacraments, its reconciling graces? Yet the church, unlike its blameless Master, is at times covered with blame and shame it well deserves; usually in consequence of having curried favour with men of the world, a favour by nature transitory and predictably, if hypocritically, condemned by subsequent generations. (The Trudeaus, père et fils, make for an interesting case study here, which perhaps I’ll attempt another time.) This makes its mission very much more difficult than it already is; indeed, all but impossible. For the church, like its Master and for his sake, is meant to be covered with a blame and a shame it does not deserve, just because it will not curry favour, or make itself politically and culturally amenable, in any way that compromises its witness. It may venture a thousand generosities, but none that impinge on its own seraphic vocation. It may suffer a thousand humiliations, but only for its Lord.

The real difficulty with the church, in other words, is not its being party to conflicts between man and man, whether in an innocent or a guilty fashion. (The residential schools era, like our own, provides examples of both.) The real difficulty with the church is that it points to a conflict between God and man, and to its only possible solution: embrace of the cross and hope of the resurrection.

And when, by reason of dullness due to the many sins it tolerates among its own, or due to its preference (even now!) for being chaplain to the state rather than prophet to the people, it will not or cannot do this pointing effectively—what then? Must it not be turned upside down by the divine Artist and marked afresh with the sign of contradiction, until those sins and preferences are purged by the zeal of the Holy One of Israel, the Lord of hosts?

---