A Pleasing Aroma (Mystagogy, Part 3)

During my years of altar service while preparing to receive Holy Orders, one of the roles I fulfilled most often was that of thurifer, the one who carries the thurible in which the incense is burned. I remember getting acquainted with the rituals of lighting the coals, the smell of fresh grains of frankincense, and the intricate metal-work of the chains holding the bowl of the thurible, which would instantly kink up if you even looked at them the wrong way. The thurifer remains near the thurible throughout the service, and so by the end they have been thoroughly coated by its smoke. It is a scent unlike anything else, and it lingers for hours. Long after the service, on a Sunday afternoon, the church still smells of that deep and sweet and spicy smell. When I would arrive home after church, my family or friends would instantly know what I had been doing, and where I had been. I still smelled like church.

There are few features of the traditional Liturgy that are as immediately striking as the use of incense. The sacramental worldview is not satisfied until it comprehends all of life, so of course it obtains in the place and use of one of our primary senses. The striking quality of incense as an instrument and symbol of worship has to do, first, with the power of our sense of smell. I am told by those with much more knowledge than me about anatomy and physiology that our olfactory sense knows a direct connection to the parts of our brain that regulate emotion and memory. Our sense of smell stirs powerfully meaningful memories, not so much because we are reminded of them, but because they revive visceral experiences. Smell adds dimensionality to seeing and hearing, invoking deep things like fear or safety, the gross or the reverent.

The immediacy and potency of this sense oblige us to a deliberate use of anything that might stir or direct it. We take our sense of smell seriously because it helps us to know whether it is okay to be there or not. The use of incense in churches tends to be a divisive issue for a number of reasons, but especially in conversations about sensitivity to newcomers. Incense, it is argued, is too disorienting to be helpful at making newcomers feel welcome. It is unlike anything else; it admits of no easy transition into the experience of it. One moment it is not there, and the next is there and it lingers with you. A disorienting smell can trigger our sense of not being okay in a place, that something is wrong, that we are in some kind of danger. Typically, the sight of smoke means we should get out of the building, not kneel down and breathe deeply. Is it then not more distracting and alienating than it is worth? Should we not rather make the church inviting?

These are good questions. And considered as but one of a number of liturgical styles or aesthetics, the answer should probably be to dispense with incense. But what if disorientation, the sense of radically breaking with the familiar, is precisely the point? What if we actually need to be grabbed by our limbic system and turned in a different direction, even before our higher brain fully catches up? What if there is such a thing in our endlessly multitasking and multi-purpose world for a space that is truly only for one purpose? These are also good questions, and ones that offer us a different way to think about the use of incense, and a way that also draws on the rich tradition of Scriptural imagery that shaped Christian worship from the earliest days of the Church. Far from an aesthetic decision or the assertion of traditional bona fides, the use of incense unites worship to worship, on earth as it is in heaven.

As Bishop Scarlett has taught us before, God likes how worship smells, and worship is always bound to sacrifice. When, after the flood subsided, Noah offered a sacrifice, “The LORD smelled a soothing aroma” (Gen. 8.21). The same language is used to describe congregational sacrifices. As God commands the Israelites to observe: “The priest shall burn all on the altar as a burnt sacrifice, an offering made by fire, a sweet aroma to the LORD” (Lev. 1.9). The sacrifice, further, was observed in tandem with the offering of incense: “And Aaron shall burn fragrant incense on it. Every morning when he dresses the lamps he shall burn it, and when Aaron sets up the lamps at twilight, he shall burn it, a regular incense offering before the LORD throughout your generations” (Ex. 30.7). The sacrifice and the offering of incense were so closely associated that the Psalmist, offering prayers at the time of the evening sacrifice, prayed, “Let my prayer be set forth in thy sight as the incense; and let the lifting up of my hands be an evening sacrifice” (Ps. 141).

The coming of the Son of God fulfilled the daily sacrifices and the sacrifice of atonement in the holiest place, as He is referred to in heaven as “the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world” (Rev. 13.8). The paradoxical nature of this Lamb of God, in the language of St. John the Baptist, is that unlike all the lambs previously sacrificed, this Lamb is slain and yet lives: “And I looked, and behold, in the midst of the throne and of the four living creatures, and in the midst of the elders, stood a Lamb as though it had been slain” (Rev. 5). The Son’s sacrifice as the Lamb who takes away the sins of the world is received by His Father in the manner as the sacrifices that prefigured it, as He declares over the Son in the Spirit at Christ’s Baptism: “You are My beloved Son; in You I am well pleased" (Lk. 3.2). This pleasing sacrifice, this self-offering of the Son in the Spirit to the Father, is the revelation by which we are redeemed. As St. Peter writes: “You were not redeemed with corruptible things, like silver or gold … but with the precious blood of Christ, as of a lamb without blemish and without spot. He indeed was foreordained before the foundation of the world, but was manifest in these last times for you” (1 Pet. 1.18-20).

It is into the pleasing aroma of the Son’s offering of Himself that we as Christians are invited to participate. This is what we are redeemed to as we are redeemed from slavery to sin and death. As St. Paul writes to the Romans: “I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that you present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable to God, which is your reasonable service” (Romans 12.1). To receive and to be incorporated into the redemptive work of Christ is to be made a participant in His sacrifice. As the Spirit comes upon us in Confirmation as at Pentecost, we are made into living sacrifices, as dead and yet we live. The fact of our lives is that we have been made capable of offering our service to God, our little worship which is a vicarious microcosm of the Son’s sacrifice and the Spirit’s transfiguring fire. We become ourselves a living act of worship before the Father. This inward and invisible worship is evidenced by our fellowship with one another as a sign of our fellowship with God in Christ. As St. Paul writes to the Ephesians: “Therefore be imitators of God as dear children. And walk in love, as Christ also has loved us and given Himself for us, an offering and a sacrifice to God for a sweet-smelling aroma” (Eph. 5.1).

When we gather together, then, in the work of worship that is always also our loving fellowship with each other, we become that pleasing aroma to God. This is why the use of incense in our worship is no mere aesthetic choice but the sacramental sign of what we have become in the Liturgy as we worship God. As I wrote in the last post, we are brought into the worship of heaven and invited to join in the song of the angels and saints. Why should not this little temple, as a local instantiation of the Temple of heaven, mirror the worship of that place? For, as Isaiah writes of it: “And the posts of the door were shaken by the voice of him who cried out, and the house was filled with smoke” (Isa. 6). As we lift up our hearts in prayer, why should not this commingle with the sweet aroma of the Son’s sacrifice through which those prayers become possible? For as St. John beheld: “And another angel came and stood at the altar with a golden censer, and he was given much incense to offer with the prayers of all the saints on the golden altar before the throne, and the smoke of incense, with the prayers of the saints, rose before God from the hand of the angel” (Rev. 8).

The sensory symbols of the Liturgy remain stylistic choices only insofar as we retain a shallow view of how we are being transformed in Christ, and only insofar as we persist in a constrained sense of what our work of worship is and means. It would be unacceptably audacious to burn incense in the church unless Christ has done what He has indeed done for us. We would be like Nadab and Abihu, who kindled strange fire and burned strange incense. But if we are, in fact, made present to and with our Lord on His Day in the Spirit, then the sweet aroma of the church rightly transports us where our intellect can struggle to ascend. When we smell the smell of the church, it is to know very deeply that the church is not like anything in this world, but is rather an outpost of the Kingdom of Heaven in this world. And if so, it would do well to smell like it. And if so, we could do worse than to leave smelling a bit like heaven.

Until we arrive where all senses, symbols, and realities meet in perfect union, may we entrust ourselves to the sacrifice of the Lamb of God and be joined to His perfect worship. As we pray when we bless the new incense on Easter Eve: “By his holy and glorious wounds, Christ our Lord guard us and preserve us. Amen.”