The Scent of God, the Smell of Heaven

Monica, my eight-month-old daughter, was not falling asleep calmly. I was singing "In the Bleak Midwinter" for the nine billionth time, and she was howling like a banshee, quite unappreciative of my musical efforts. In desperation, I whipped off my shirt and tucked it snuggly around her pillow.

She stopped crying almost instantly and calmly drifted off to the Land of Nod.

I was elated. I was also cold and shirtless, but hey, the baby was sleeping, and--as all parents know--if the baby is asleep, personal indignities matter very little.

Since that moment, I've repeated the same trick several times, usually with the same results. When her face rests against clothing with my scent, she calms down and sleeps. Apparently, Mama's smell is enough to make her feel secure.

Finding that my clothes help meet Monica's need for a tangible reminder of my presence while she sleeps came as a delightful stroke of luck. It also struck me as a lesson in the sensory nature of the Christian faith.

There's an unfortunate trend, particularly among Protestants, to divorce our senses from our spirituality. The most modern and hip churches look nothing like churches at all, but often like hybrids between warehouses and movie theaters. Maybe there's a cross in the sanctuary. But maybe not. It seems the point is to make church as non-churchy as possible, ostensibly because people don't really want church. They want "authenticity," a concept apparently at odds with stained glass and candles.

I'm not sure how long this trend will continue, but it runs rather opposite to a rich, sensory spirituality which is--while perhaps less modern--ultimately far more substantial than it's trendy counterpart.

Following Christ has always been outrageously physical. The Incarnation, Crucifixion, and Resurrection ought to be proof enough that God doesn't just keep to some nebulous, non-physical reality. There's a real baby, and a real death, and a real tomb involved here.

While we needed a real, physical Savior, we also need real, physical reminders of his love--something sensory now to remind us of another sensory reality from two thousand years ago.

When I was a child, someone told me that Protestants don't have crucifixes like Catholics do because Jesus is no longer on the cross. The logic of that reasoning escapes me, especially since there seems to be no particular Protestant difficulty in having a painting of Jesus on the cross. But it took marrying a Catholic for me, an Anglican, to discover the beauty of a crucifix.

When we moved into our first apartment as a married couple, we decorated the walls with our combined collection of religious art. I brought the crosses I purchased in Italy and Ireland, and Benjamin brought the crucifixes he had acquired in his bachelorhood, along with a few icons. As happens when one is renting, we hung our art wherever a nail was already stuck in the wall. Benjamin placed a crucifix close to my side of the bed because that's where we found an unused nail.

The crucifix that hangs in our bedroom

When I was pregnant and grieving my daughter's diagnosis of rhombencephalosynapsis, I often stared up at that crucifix. One particularly wretched day, I was inwardly crying out, "I don't deserve this!" about my daughter's brain condition and the possibility of taking care of a mentally and physically handicapped child for the rest of our lives. While gazing at the crucifix, I felt Christ quietly answer: "But neither have you deserved this love." In that moment, the question of deserving or not deserving my circumstances fell away. There are times I still gaze upon that crucifix, a comforting image that silences the issue of fairness in our life with God.

The modern trend of divesting ourselves and our churches of religious art is simply a yielding to the Gnostic temptation to separate our spiritual life from our physical life. But such a divide inevitably ends up making both our spiritual lives and our physical experience on earth much poorer than it was intended to be. Christianity should not drain the tangible world of meaning, but rather infuse it with a richness hitherto unknown. As Thomas Howard says in Evangelical is Not Enough, "The Christian religion, far from driving a wedge between them, knits the spiritual and the physical back together."

A crucifix is not the only possible object to comfort us. I have often found great spiritual rest in the crashing of ocean waves, the peacefulness of a Bach prelude, the warmth of my husband's arms around me. These are also gifts and reminders that "the world is charged with the grandeur of God" and that he reaches out to us in sensory ways through the very physical world he created.

When I see my little girl settle down as I tuck around her a shirt bearing my scent, I am reminded that we all need such reminders of our Father's love, be they icons or a crucifix, the breathtaking grandeur of the sea, or the stillness of a candle in the dark. These tangible things can hold for us the scent of God, the smell of heaven, and so calm our anxious hearts to rest in him.