Loading...This article begins a five-part series on the role of the senses – taste, touch, smell, hearing, and vision – in our experience of common worship. I invite you to use these thoughts as a way to focus your own senses on what happens on Sunday morning and in all the other places and times when you encounter God.
Liturgy means the “work of the people.” It is what we do together in church – the singing, preaching, prayer, giving and receiving of the bread and wine in the Eucharist, and many other large and small things that make up our life of public worship. While the words that we say and hear in the liturgy are obviously very important, they are only one part of what we bring to and take away from the experience. All of our senses – hearing, sight, smell, taste, and touch – are the paths by which the full experience of the liturgy – and of life, which it mirrors – is made known to us. If we can allow ourselves to experience the liturgy in multiple ways, its meaning will be decoded for us in new and maybe unexpected dimensions. We see what we cannot hear, and taste what we cannot touch.
Of course, we should have clearly in mind that the senses are instruments rather than ends. One cannot taste sanctity or see salvation in a literal sense. What we think we sense in the liturgy cannot and should not be seen as defining God or God’s self-expression to us and through us in our common worship. Still, trying to hold together the actual physical experience of worship and its the spiritual meaning starts a conversation about how the senses may lead into the mystery of God.
An obvious criticism of a sensory approach to liturgy is that physical limitations in some cases impair, and in others prevent, full participation in it by those who are so limited. As will become apparent, there are elements of each kind of sensory experience that are unique. This may be seen as diminishing the experience to some degree. However, there is considerable overlap. Somber music and stark visual plainness can both produce a sober and reflective mood. The smell of a loved one’s cologne can conjure the same emotions as his or her embrace. Synæsthesia, the experience of sensations through “discordant” sensory pathways, also plays a role here. It is not uncommon, and perhaps more common than we realize, for someone to report that a drink “tastes purple,” or that music “smells like smoke.”
Beneath and behind all this is the theological insight that God wills to be made known to us in our common worship. If we begin from the assumptions, well grounded in scripture and tradition, that all things are made in God’s image, and that God seeks the reconciliation of all creation, speculation as to the role of any or all the human senses in the process of God’s self-revelation is much more descriptive than prescriptive. No limitation, whatever its nature, can prevent the in-breaking of God.
In my remaining space this month, I will offer a few thoughts about taste. Taste is one of the earliest sensory experiences we have. From a very young age, children learn to distinguish between things that have agreeable and disagreeable tastes, and to reject the latter. This has its origin – at least partly – in survival. Things that are poisonous or dangerous to eat often taste bitter or sour or otherwise unpleasant. Discrimination can be a life and death matter. This is so fundamental to us that, in many languages, taste assumes the metaphorical meaning of the power of choice and evaluation in all things. In our church life, notions of good and bad taste are the often unspoken fellow-travelers of ostensibly higher considerations of theological significance and symbolic power.
Interestingly, taste has been among the more allegorized senses. Hildegard of Bingen saw the ultimate goal of taste as being the sweetness of Christ. Jakob Boehme, a 17th Century German mystic saw the tastes – sweetness, sourness, and bitterness – as both spiritual and physical. In his construction of the universe, sweetness was not simply a characteristic of fruit, it was in fact the creator of fruit. Together, the basic tastes created the universe.
Another familiar allegorizing takes place in the Passover Seder. Each of the foods used in the ritual portion of the meal is understood to have symbolic significance that is experienced mainly through how it tastes. Marror (bitter herbs) represents “the bitter servitude our ancestors experienced as slaves in Egypt.” Haroseth (a sweet mixture of fruit, nuts, and wine), when mixed with marror, represents God’s loving-kindness, which dulled the bitterness of the Egyptian bondage. The salt water into which vegetables are dipped represents (according to some authorities) the tears shed over the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple.
But what of taste as a source of liturgical meaning? A place to start may be the observation that meals – organized “tasting frames” - are commonly used to make occasions real. Examples of this would include wedding banquets, birthday dinners, luncheons after funerals, and receptions after religious and public ceremonies of all kinds. Indeed, in the case of birthday dinners, the meal is often the main event of the celebration.
The bread and wine of the Eucharist recall Jesus’ command to continue to celebrate the sacrament, but also remind us of our own need to be fed spiritually and to feed the world in both literal and spiritual ways. Although the Eucharistic celebration can involve many of the senses – seeing the elevation of the elements, hearing the words of the prayers, feeling the bread in one’s hands – it is most especially taste which makes the experience “real.” The substance (however stylized) of the bread and the warm sweetness of the wine give present weight and character to Christ. We can “taste and see that the Lord is good” (Ps 34:8), and be reminded that as God feeds us, so we also must make God’s love real to others.
Blessings
Howie+
