September 12, 2013

So as part of my Teaching the Bible class tonight, we were asked to spend some time at a few different sensory stations. Some played music, some were based on touch, on smell, on sight, etc. Each station had different relics from in and around Jerusalem and Israel. We were then asked to reflect upon them and so I wrote the following stream of consciousness reflection and I thought I would share. Not for any particular reason, but I thought I would. The Rose of Sharon, in this example, is a reference to an anointing oil, not the bush that grows in the garden.

Rose of Sharon. I know the plant or bush that we know here is not the one referenced in scripture, or so I am told. Yet, when I smelled the Rose of Sharon ointment, my mind was immediately taken back to two things. First of all, my maternal grandfather’s favorite plant was the rose of sharon. It smelled differently, but the association with the name brought to mind images of him. Secondly, while I never knew what perfume my paternal grandmother wore, the moment I smelled the ointment, it was precisely the smell that she had. I haven’t smelled her in 17 years, but I immediately knew her scent. Makes me think of how our lives and our memories are an amalgum of sensory perceptions. Even the senses we use in church, in one way or another help us to experience parts of scripture, even if we don’t necessarily realize it at the time. The smell of the sanctuary just after the hanging of the greens is something that is unique and unforgettable. The quietness of an empty sanctuary has, for years, helped us to feel closer or more apparent to God in some way. The Bible is the living word because we are alive and our lives are made up of these moments, these senses, these experiences that bind us to a story, our own and each others and ultimately God’s. The experiences we have at church or through reading scripture tie us to God’s ultimate story that has begun but has not yet ended, it is a story that is alive and however we experience that, it makes us part of that living story. Sometimes it is written, sometimes it is seen, sometimes it is smelled, sometimes it is touched, sometimes it is heard, and sometimes it simply is in such a way that we couldn’t extricate ourselves from it no matter how hard we tried.

The pictures and the objects that I had not seen before may not have reminded me about something specific or conjured up any memories, but they do help me to see that God’s story is larger than me and is experienced by others in different ways, so that my interpretation is one of many, making up the quilt that is the fabric of life that God has sewn together, uniting all his children in the story that is still being told.

God is in the known and the unknown. They mysterious and the mundane are two sides of the same coin. There is no limit to the attributes of God, whether in the strong taste of the salt, or the foreignness of the language written on an Israeli coin. Even where we don’t expect to see or experience Him, there He is.

Our words spoken in worship are also part of that story, but I am reminded that the story is told using much else than those words alone.