Shark Smile Lady
Now I’m going to share, with you, an experience that still haunts me. I was speaking to a woman in a church that I’d decided to visit. Before then, I’d never been to church, but I was starting to explore more of life, and the people that I share the world with. I’d always considered myself to be a social scientist, but I’d been closing myself off to this huge realm of human behaviour and civil history. So, I was in a church, and I was talking to a woman.
What struck me first was her smile. It crept up one side of her face – if you saw her in profile, on the side that wasn’t smiling, she’d look very serious – and it just felt so insincere. When I told my housemate about the woman, I called it her shark smile. She looked dangerous, like a predator. It shook me, and talking to her was desperately uncomfortable.
She spoke about her faith, although I won’t go into that. This is a site about love and political revolution, not faith. And everyone’s faith is different – I knew that this one woman’s experience of faith wasn’t representative of other people’s.
“Better”
At one point, the shark smile lady moves on to the topic of heaven. This is the bit that stayed with me. She wanted to explain what heaven was to me, and this is what she said:
You know how good it can be here on Earth? Well, in heaven, it’s even better!
What’s the deeper meaning of what she said here? “In heaven, it’s better”, means that it’s good here, but the grass is greener on later pastures. Does that feel right with you? It didn’t with me.
Why Try?
The problem was in the way she’d casually dismissed the idea of making the world better, because, well, why bother? When you get to heaven it will already be better. Why take the time to improve Earth?
What kind of life do you think this lady was living? Does it sound like she’s struggling under poverty and oppression, or does it sound like she’s quite comfortable? I don’t think that anyone who essentially says “I will have it all soon, so why try harder?” is living with any hardship.
I was disgusted by her lack of drive to make the world better, and upset to have met someone living so selfishly. What was so scary was knowing that she was just one of millions of people who have that same kind of “I’ll be fine so whatever” attitude. I mean, I knew about it, but I’d never seen it so blatantly, plastered across the crooked shark smile of someone.
(Note: Again, this was just one person in that church. I’ve since met dozens of different people of faith – and befriended most of them – and have never come across another shark smile lady!)