Worshipping God with our senses 4 - smell

Regent Hall SA

Today we continue our series ‘Worshipping God with our senses’ , focussing on the sense of smell; smell, so often mysterious and intimate with the power to attract or repel us. I’m sure that even sitting here reading this, you can bring to mind sweet (and not-so-sweet) smells which evoke memories and experiences of people and places you love, or even find difficult. Sadly, the bible is meagre in its references to smell and our hymnology is not great either – but digging deeper, it becomes clear that God has a sense of smell! And, as importantly, as human beings we are gifted an amazing olfactory system meant to be a sacred pathway through which we can worship God and communicate God’s welcome to the world. So let’s pay loving attention to this gift of smell which we so often undervalue (until, of course, it’s taken away by illness), and let it teach and train us again to appreciate who God is for us. And let us be, as Paul says, a ‘Christ-like fragrance rising up to God ...’ (2 Corinthians 2:15). Major Caroline Mingay