When I was very little, I used to visit my mother’s mother. And my mother’s mother’s mother lived upstairs. Her room was a mysterious place, alluring and a bit forbidding. She was in her mid-90s, of German descent, a faithful Lutheran, a holy woman. What I remember about going up to call on her in her room was the scent. The crystal bottles on her dresser of old perfumes, jars of unknown unguents, clothing and bedding all emitting a faint breath of long, long living and of significance. One note was lily of the valley, the first I knew of that flower, before I encountered it growing in the garden.
When my first daughter was born I remember how her infant body smelled – of milk and flesh, of moisture, sweet and sour and irresistible. You wanted to be close hour after hour.
In the diocese of Massachusetts, where I was first ordained, the priests would go to St. Paul’s Cathedral on the Tuesday in Holy Week for the Blessing of the Oils, to renew our ordination vows and to be given a little vial of oil for our ministries in the year to come. It was pungent and spicy, and its fragrance was familiar, but unlike anything else. It was the fragrance of holiness.
Mary of Bethany is the priest who presides on the Monday of Holy Week. At the fulcrum of the gospel of John, between the death and raising of Lazarus and the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus, she anoints Jesus’ feet with a pound of costly perfume made of pure nard and wipes them with her hair. Her sacramental substance is this precious oil, and it touches all who eat at the table, all who serve, those who understand and those who do not. “The house was filled with the fragrance of the perfume.”
The anointing is the sacrament of joy, of beauty, of celebration. It is the sign of loving, of intimacy, of abiding. It means grief and goodbye. Anointing with oil honors the body of Jesus, with them now, and soon to be gone.
We know this holy day and the holy week ahead through that most profound faculty, the sense of smell. The olfactory sacrament circumvents logic.
Krister Stendahl taught Ten Commandments of Preaching. One of the most important was:
“No moral lessons on high holy days.”
In Holy Week we need not seek instruction. Today, tomorrow, in the dark hours of Friday and Saturday, with the ministry of Mary of Bethany, we may simply breathe the fragrance of the perfume.
How are you anointed?
What other sensory memories bring you closer to the sacrament?
