It hits me as
soon as I cross the threshold of the church: the fragrance. Then I look up and see the flowers from which
the fragrance comes, the lilies especially.
It is delightful. The place where we encounter God on earth is
a place of beautiful and sweet-smelling life: a garden.
In the
Liturgy of the Hours for Holy Saturday, we have a reading “From an ancient
homily on Holy Saturday.” 'Ancient' usually means about the second century; the author’s name is unknown. You heard Father Brian Kane quote excerpts
from it in his homily if you were here for the Solemn Liturgy of Good
Friday. The ancient preacher refers to
the recurrence of the garden as the
place where our story of salvation unfolds: the Garden of Eden, the Garden of Gethsemane,
etc. He portrays Jesus speaking to Adam
among the dead:
For your sake, I, your God, became your son; I, the
Lord, took the form of a slave; I, whose home is above the heavens, descended
to the earth and beneath the earth. For
your sake, for the sake of man, I became like a man without help, free among
the dead. For the sake of you, who left a garden, I was betrayed to the Jews in a
garden, and I was crucified in a garden.
One might
also infer that Christ was buried in a garden, and rose in a garden. Remember, when the risen Jesus revealed
Himself to Mary at the tomb, she first thought He was … the gardener.
Of course God,
the giver and nurturer of life, is Gardener of all Creation, Who restores and
renews life through the death and resurrection of His Son. So to make that great work intelligible to us,
it happens in a garden setting. Without
this instructional element, we might continue foolishly to yearn for that other
garden, from which our forebears were exiled for their willful disobedience.
But the
garden that springs up in the location of Christ’s saving act of obedience is
infinitely more delightful. This garden
emphasizes the life and richness won for us by His redeeming work. And the flowers in our church give us here
and now a hint of that same life and richness.
Because what
God wants for us is in reality good for us, and pleasing, it pleases all our human senses. For that reason, eternal glory has among its
attributes not only bright beautiful light and color, and sweet joyful sounds
of celestial choirs, but also a delightful fragrance known as ‘the odor of
sanctity.’ It is most often
characterized as floral – roses or other fragrant flowers. This pervasive and sweet scent, not oppressive
or stifling, has often been observed to accompany miraculous works and
apparitions, as well as the lives and even the dead bodies of saints.
Saint
Augustine in his Confessions
described his own turn toward Christ most famously in the paragraph that
begins: Late have I loved you, O beauty
ever ancient, ever new, late have I loved you! In it, he describes God’s working through
every one of his senses: You called, you shouted, and you broke
through my deafness. You flashed, you shone, and you dispelled my
blindness. You breathed your fragrance on me; I drew in breath and now I pant for
you. I have tasted you, now I hunger
and thirst for more. You touched me, and
I burned for your peace.
God, who did
not disdain our human nature but rather became Man and dwelt among us, reveals
Himself by the working of all our human senses, smell included. In this way, an earthly maxim applies to our
pursuit of heaven as well: breathe deep, and Follow your nose!
Monsignor
Smith
