Loading...This is the second of five articles on the senses and how they help us to experience fully the presence of God in our common worship. Last month I offered some introductory thoughts and talked about the sense of taste. This month, we will consider the sense of smell.
The French anthropologist Daniel Sperber made the interesting observation that smell is a sense that evokes recognition but not recollection. By this he meant that it is nearly impossible for most people to recreate a particular scent in present consciousness in a way that it is quite possible for most people to “see” a color or “hear” a sound from memory. At the same time, it is often surprising how a scent experienced only once in the distant past is immediately recognizable when encountered again. This, Sperber suggested, is an innate response.
Even more interesting is the common experience that when re-encountered, a scent brings to mind the people, places, things, and events with which one associates it. The smell of my grandparents’ attic, encountered years later in a very different place, brought instantly and involuntarily to mind not only the picnic basket that I had found there, but even the blue and red plastic plates that were inside. Unable to be re-created in the memory, smells nonetheless come with other associations attached. As Sperber put it, “the smell only holds the attention in order to re-orient it to what surrounds it,” an excellent analogy for a liturgical symbol.
Before turning to the spiritual meaning of the sense of smell, it is necessary first to make one further qualitative observation. Scents, in and of themselves, do not have names. They are called either specifically, by their sources (“incense,” “frying onions,” “hyacinth”), or generically, by the effect they commonly produce (“pleasant,” “acrid,” “foul”). Any scent may have one or both kinds of name, but while it is difficult to discuss the subject without recourse to the former kind, it is arguably the latter that is of greater interest. As much or more than with the other senses, the evocative power of the sense of smell lies with the associations assigned to it by each individual to a greater extent than with the thing itself.
With this in mind, what can we say about smell and divine mystery? Ironically, the first possible inward path begins not with scent at all, but rather with images. Sperber’s suggestion that smells point to things outside themselves brings immediately to mind Eastern Orthodox icons of the Blessed Virgin Mary, the Theotokos. It is a common observation of such icons that she is never shown alone, but rather always pointing to the infant Jesus, who is usually seated on the “throne of her lap.” Present in the picture, she is nonetheless pleased to draw the eye to the One who might otherwise be overshadowed. This is a maternal act, an act of faith, as the eternal Son of God is at this point in human time still the helpless infant son of Mary.
So also does scent connect us to God at a visceral, non-verbal level. One imagines the greens in a church decorated for Christmas. Or the passing of the epitaphion in its flower-covered bier on Orthodox Good Friday. Or the banks of lilies on Easter Day. These scents have meaning in their contexts, and bring to mind other worship in other places and times, but they also act at a deeper level, working in us a recognition of God as one who is present to us both before and after conscious verbal thought is possible.
A second pathway lies in the pointing. By pointing to the infant Jesus, the Blessed Virgin not only draws attention to Him, but also necessarily draws attention away from herself. This is much the same function that scent may serve in the liturgy. The smoke of incense may be seen, in some traditions the bells on the censer may be heard, but as the scent of the incense diffuses through the church, attention continues to be drawn away from the self – and ideally away from the source of the scent – toward the ritual action.
In this way, the sense of smell focuses the other senses, calls them to order in aid of an experience outside of, and yet defined by, sensory inputs. This is, in microcosm, the human experience of God. The One who creates is outside the created order, and so is in a fundamental way not knowable by sensory means, and yet can only be approached in that way. Like the odor of incense that draws the eye to the altar, the human experience of the world must point to something outside itself and then get out of the way.
The naming of scents by their effect also bears deeper consideration. To see an object or hear a sound, and name it “apple” or “car engine” is to classify it cognitively, to put it in perspective without participating in its nature, its “apple-ness” or “engine-ness.” Even to describe something as beautiful or evil generally requires some thought-based framework, though we may not be aware of its operation. By contrast, odors act on us in a much more immediate way. For example, smell (and its nearest neighbor taste) is able to produce physical reactions – nausea, salivation – much more readily than the other senses. We are, in a sense, drawn into participation in the nature of the scent, its qualities recreated and given concrete form in our reaction to it.
This kind of relationship applies quite easily to our interaction with and knowledge of God. An interesting example of this is the Jewish Havdalah ceremony. Conducted as the Sabbath is ending, as a way of marking the boundary between sacred and ordinary time, the ceremony includes the use of a container of spices, the scent of which is intended to evoke the sweetness of the Sabbath, and by association, of God. The pleasant scent evokes in the worshipper a cascade of associations – sweetness leads to peace, peace leads to the mercy of God, mercy leads to the love of God for humanity – that draws him or her into the contemplation of the nature of God. The mysterious comes halfway to concreteness, to meet us in our response to creation.
A final path lies in the observation that smells evoke recognition but not recollection. Each time we celebrate the Eucharist, we do what generations before us have done, yet each time we repeat the action it is colored by the experience, needs, and expectations of those present and what is happening in their lives. The sacrament is recognized in the present without the need for its origin to be recreated (or even to be capable of being recreated). Scents work in much the same way. I may smell again the perfume my mother wore when I was a child, and that may bring back a range of memories of that time, but these are colored consciously or unconsciously by all of my intervening experience. Each encounter with a scent repeats, and also deepens, our prior encounters with it. In each liturgy, “I come with joy to meet my Lord,” recognizing the presence of God even when the present circumstances may be unlike those of the time before.
Blessings
Howie+
