I do my best in these articles, but no
words can really communicate the essence of what we are doing here. For that, you'd need Smell-O-Vision.
In case you didn't know, Smell-O-Vision
was a system developed in the 1950s that released odors during the
projection of a movie so that the viewer could actually smell what was
happening on screen. Thirty years later, cult filmmaker John Waters
tried the same thing with scratch and sniff cards. In both cases, the
idea was to take advantage of the scientific fact that smell is easily
the strongest and most vivid of our senses when it comes to processing
emotional experiences. If you've ever smelled something and had
memories you hadn't thought of in years come flooding back, you know
what I’m talking about.
What you may not know, however, is what
the scent of urine in a hallway tells you about a low-rent apartment
building, or what the combination of cigarette smoke and baby formula
on an infant’s blanket tells you about a family, or what cheap liquor
on an addict’s early morning breath tells you about the rest of their
day, or maybe the rest of their life. These are some of the smells I’m
learning these days.
I know a few already. At the grocery
store the other day, I didn’t even need to turn around, let alone ask
any questions to be sure the man behind me had no house, no car, no
job, and nobody looking after him. What I needed instead was the
intestinal fortitude to talk with him like a friend even though he was
mentally unstable, and to offer him a ride to the soup kitchen even
though it would take half a day to get his stench out of my van.
I know marijuana in the afternoon air
means I’m going to have to answer a lot of bizarre theological
questions from my street corner buddies. I know
the smell of mold and too many cats means helping a friend pass her
Section 8 housing inspection is going to take more than a morning, and
the smell of an open electric oven means we might as well not bother
because her lousy slumlord still hasn’t fixed the furnace. And,
unfortunately, I know the smell of fecal matter coming out from under a
dirty set of clothes means it doesn’t much matter how skillful I am as
an after school tutor.
There are wonderful smells here too, of
course – ammonia in the spotless kitchen of a single mother with two
jobs, soul food in a neighborhood restaurant, talcum powder on the
older church ladies, my warm house at the end of a long day – but not
nearly enough to cover the others. If you are highly sensitive in that
way, like Marty, how much you can love poor people sometimes boils down
to how long you can hold your breath.
There is more to it than that, though.
As I said earlier, smelling things is probably the most powerful way
that we feel where we are and what we’re doing at a particular moment
in time. No wonder a hospital administrator recently told me that his
boss devoted an entire staff meeting to making sure their hospital
smells as clean as it is, in order to subconsciously instill confidence
in their patients’ families. For better and for worse, smells
communicate things that words just can’t.
The bad smells here do not instill
confidence at all. On the contrary, what they communicate is a deep,
visceral sense of neglect and decay and futility that threatens to
overwhelm this whole neighborhood and our hope along with it. So then,
when I tell you that my dream is to motivate and organize folks to
clean things up around here, you can rest assured I mean that quite
literally. We have plenty of souls to soothe, to be sure, but we also
have bodies to bathe and clothes to wash, basements to clean out and
houses to renovate.
I know we can’t change everything in our
poor little neighborhood. Honestly, my best guess is that we can’t
even change very much. But even on my most dismal days, when the odors
of brokenness around me are more than I can stand, I believe we can, at
the very least, leave some places and some people around here perfumed
with the sweet smells of care, healing, and hope. After all, most of
those smells are simply a matter of soap and water, and hammers and
nails, and meat and potatoes.
In the meantime, since you don’t have
Smell-O-Vision, or Odorama, or probably even a good aroma therapy kit,
I guess you’ll have to take my word for it that loving poor people can
be an awfully smelly business. Then again, maybe not. Maybe you just
know a different set of smells than I do, because you are trying to
love a different kind of poor people. I hope so, because I suspect
that at least part of the reason God calls us to all this smelly loving
in the first place is so we aren’t completely knocked out when we’re
the ones who stink.
- Bart Campolo
Bart Campolo is a veteran urban minister and activist
who speaks and writes about grace, faith, loving relationships and
social justice. Bart is the leader of The Walnut Hills Fellowship, a
local ministry in inner city Cincinnati. He is also founder of Mission
Year, a Christian ministry which recruits committed young adults to
live and work among the poor in inner-city neighborhoods across the
country, and executive director of EAPE, which develops and supports
innovative, cost-effective mission projects around the world.