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Olfactory Faith - 4/11/052005 Archive - 2006 Archive

Scientists claim that smell is the most powerful of the senses; that a familiar smell can conjure up an entire past event or person in a way that is more intense and more real than anything of which touch or sight or sound or taste can remind us. I have personally experienced this phenomenon on many occasions.

When my children were very young, we had a teething toy shaped like a bracelet, which had a very distinct scent. The first time I smelled it, I knew exactly where and when I’d first smelled that scent. It was in my maternal grandmother’s dressing room. She had a vanity covered in grandmotherly-type make-up stuff which included a small round cylinder of face powder, decorated with orange and gold, which I had opened and sniffed during my many solo explorations of her upstairs. The scent of the teething bracelet carried me immediately back to that upstairs room in her central Florida house in the 1960's. I remember the way the light came in through the window and reflected off the mirror. I remember the color and feel of the hardwood floor, the cushion pattern of the vanity stool and how it felt to sit and stare at myself in the mirror.

There are other scents that generate an equally vivid return to comforting childhood memories: the smell of fried egg sandwiches with mayonnaise, and orange cinnamon rolls fresh from the oven remind me of my paternal grandmother’s faithful preparations for our much-anticipated early morning fishing trips to the Gulf of Mexico. The smell of fish frying reminds me of the almost-always successful (thanks to Granddaddy) evening ritual and rewards of the day on the water.

Our faith experience can also have its own unique scent collection. Particular scents may remind us of the people and places where our faith was nurtured or challenged to grow. I suspect that the smell of bread and fish cooking were just such olfactory jump-starts for the first disciples.

In an old episode of the TV series “M*A*S*H”, one of the surgeons is facing the struggle of war’s carnage from a medical perspective. Having been exposed to countless hours, days, and weeks of “meatball surgery”, piecing young men together, only to send them back into the line of fire, he is on the verge of a psychotic breakdown. In a desperate attempt to cope, he leaves the surgical unit and goes toward the battle zone. At the battalion aid station, the first stop for wounded soldiers, he encounters a fatally wounded teenager. Both the surgeon and the wounded soldier sense that death is near. The wounded boy asks the surgeon to hold his hand, as life transitions to death. In a desperate attempt to understand life’s mystery, the surgeon asks, “Can you see anything? Can you feel anything? I have to know!” The soldier’s only reply is, “I smell bread.”

The gospel’s call is to daily be alert to the scents that offer us glimpses of the risen Christ. How and where have you smelled him?

© 2005 Todd Jenkins