Fr. Gary Smith with Charles Marine, center, and Fathers Pierno and Ongoa.
Sentinel photo by Fr. John Whitney
During Mass, a viper crawled into the rafters of the small church. The priest lost the attention of his congregation.
Among Sudanese refugees, beating snakes to death is a communal duty. And for good reason. Once a week, someone would die of a bite.
There were other distractions at Mass, like the time a six-year-old boy pulled down his paints and relieved himself mightily on the dirt floor, just as his mother had finished uttering a prayer for rain. Everyone had a good laugh over that one.
One of the better storytellers in the Catholic world also happens to be a Jesuit who follows the gospel’s prompting to live among the poor.
Father Gary Smith, longtime street minister in the Pacific Northwest, has returned from six years in Uganda.
Like his experiences on skid roads in Tacoma and Portland, his work among the Sudanese and Ugandans has prompted a book of great beauty. “They Come Back Singing” (Loyola Press, 226 pages, paperback $14.95) is a collection of journals and letters crafted into a narrative that goes to work on the heart like small waves — seemingly gentle but able to soften even solid rock.
The 70-year-old priest is an introvert who writes as part of his cycle of expending and regaining energy.
In typical clean, crisp prose, he tells stories and then reflects. To his credit, he does not attempt to give lessons or foist morals, but simply steps to the heart of the matter.
He is constantly offering helpful detail that makes the reader smile and nod, telling us, for instance, that “you can hear Sudanese laughing at great distances.”
The idea of serving refugees came up over beer and a slice of vegetarian pie at Old Town Pizza in Portland in 1999. Father Smith noted how he was becoming too comfortable in his life. One of his pals cited the philosopher Kierkegaard, who envisioned a personal truth for which each individual would choose to die. The priest decided he wanted to be with the poor in a radical way and spent a sleepless night in prayer and discernment.
Despite this heady beginning, Father Smith is too down-to-earth to stay there. The first entry in his journal upon arriving in Uganda admits poetically to “an army of potential catastrophes marching through my head, including death.”
He lived in a one-room thatch-covered hut called a tukul, which he shared with “lizards, fleas, dive-bomber moths, grasshoppers, spiders, mosquitoes, plump cockroaches, and a million what-the-hell-is-that creepy crawlers.” Things were not built for his 6-foot-2 frame, so he constantly banged his head. Temperatures would soar to 120 degrees or more in the dry season.
A solar panel stored up electricity for a few hours at night, which is when he would type notes. At times, when the power systems failed, he wrote by candlelight.
When Father Smith worked in northern Uganda, hundreds of thousands of Sudanese refugees had flown there from the racial, religious and political strife of their homeland. Run by the oil-rich powers of the Arab-dominated north, the Sudanese government had little use, at best, for the black African southerners. Many were hunted down and killed by militias in a horror the U.S. government has called a genocide. As many as 2 million may have died in the decades of fighting and 4 million were driven from their homes.
Perhaps Father Smith’s greatest gift is his avoidance of making metaphors of human beings. In “Street Journal: Finding God in the Homeless” and “Radical Compassion: Finding Christ in the Heart of the Poor,” his books from the Northwest urban ministry, his lovely and tragic and hilarious people were just that — people full of dignity. The same holds true for the folks the priest encountered during his work with Jesuit Refugee Services. He writes real characters who in even a few words come to matter a great deal.
He recalls the elder who comes to a religious education session, despite having lost his 21-year-old daughter to a quick illness. She was the only one of his seven children still living. His wife had died, too. The man seems like a kind of Job, but a version that does not complain. The other catechists, even though they come from a competing tribe, care tenderly for the aggrieved father.
Father Smith did sacramental work, lots of it. At one Mass in a village that got a priest only every three months or so, he performed 91 baptisms.
He also educated the people who are the frontline of the church in Africa — lay catechists elected by villagers. These unpaid disciples, in Father Smith’s eyes, are a distinguished even if rag-tag communion of earthly saints.
“They don’t just teach the faith, they become the counselor,” Father Smith said during an interview at a Portland diner. “They become Solomon for their village.”
While the people are being people in the book, Africa is being Africa.
A veteran writer, Father Smith does not overdo landscape descriptions, a peril to which the novice succumbs. Instead, he gives readers just as much as they need.
He has a keen sense of the political background, but again knows enough not to get bogged down. What he offers is helpful and just right. He explains, for example, the Lord’s Resistance Army, a powerful band that recruits children as soldiers and sex slaves and pillages the region carrying what the insane leader says is God’s will. Refugees and Ugandans lived in constant fear of the marauders.
The priest once was called to a village that had been attacked by the gang and saw the residents hacked to death. The children had been kidnapped and taken into the bush.
The suffering of children “lashes” at his soul and he expends great effort on health care and education for them. The chapter called “The Beautiful Mouth of Jacelin Ojok” tells the tender story of a shy girl with a cleft lip. Father Smith works hard to link her up with surgeons. This childless man has paternal feelings and he knows it. After the operation, he shows the girl around the mission office like a proud father.
“I was engaging the most generous part of my heart and the mysterious experience of my capacity to love,” he explains in the book.
He helps an older student scrape up $300 to attend a better school, improving her future prospects immensely. The girl’s aged father has worked himself to the bone in the fields for her, and is worn out. When the plan comes through, she cries tears of gratitude, seeing God’s work in what the priest has wrought.
“If your heart is present and you are interested not as Joe Savior but because you want to be there, you are open to them and they are open to you,” Father Smith says.
He faithfully reflects the heartfelt joy that accompanies the Subsaharan sense that no one should take himself too seriously. At his own expense, he even came to embrace the sense of humor, which is driven by good-natured ridicule.
“His white skin. Scary,” one girl whispered to another as she gawked at the lanky Californian.
“Yes,” said the other. “It’s like his skin is turned inside out. Very ugly. And his hair kind of makes him look like a rooster.”
“Yep. Poor man.”
Once, in a village latrine, his tall head poked above the privacy walls. Village children, who had never seen such a man before, surrounded the enclosure and stared as he did his business.
Humility and fun are ways to seize the moment in a world in which death visits at a moment’s notice. In an early chapter, a bolt of lightning crashes to the African soil with gruesome and shocking results and the new missionary gets acquainted fast with the tenuous nature of life here.
As the years go by, he is often called upon to anoint young people who were healthy the day before, but are to die of some tropical disease before morning.
“To preach to this sea of suffering is like learning to walk again,” he writes.
Adjusting to his lack of fluency in the local languages, he began to offer skits as homilies and used a hand-puppet for children. People responded enthusiastically, “their answers to questions rooted not in doctrine, but in their personal relationship with God.”
Generous villagers gave him live poultry and eggs as gifts. A vegetarian, he had one duck adoringly follow him around his house, until he offered it to his beloved driver, who had a family to feed.
Among the refugees, he entered a world of wild contrasts.
He marvels at how a mentally ill man who would be ejected from most churches in the U.S. is treated with gentle direction. But on a confirmation tour with the local bishop, he is accompanied by soldiers armed with Kalashnikovs because the Lord’s Resistance Army is on the loose.
One day, he is joining a communal dance to roars of delight. The next, he is called upon to drive a murderer to the regional jail. The distraught, silent man has killed his 6-year-old daughter.
In Father Smith’s books, readers get to know him as a plain-dealing interpreter of holiness. We benefit from his extraordinarily open heart.
In a chapter called “A Paratrooper in a Diaper,” for example, the priest explains his brush with dysentery. The humbling affliction, he said, actually emerged as a sort of mystical experience.
“However intense my moaning and groaning, the moment of confrontation puts things in perspective,” he writes. “God’s love for me trumps the chaos that invades my life.” He had another chance for this kind of prayer when he contracted malaria.
It is clear from the book that Father Smith found his time in Uganda a privilege.
“A heart and hearts so fully inhabited by God illuminate these pages,” Mary Sue Richen says of “They Come Back Singing.” Former minister at the Macdonald Center downtown, she worked with Father Smith over the years.
Father Smith, who has been recovering from some other health setbacks, is in shape again and plans to return to Africa this summer for another stint with refugees.
He’ll likely be in another region. Jesuit Refugee Services is now pulling out of northern Uganda, because the bulk of the job is done there.
“They Come Back Singing” has been used in a Lenten online retreat devised at Creighton University. For more information, go to www.creighton.edu/CollaborativeMinistry/Lent-with-Refugees/
