Lent Exercises: Smoke - Groaning in the Spirit

Smells are powerful memory triggers.  The smell of burning leaves or of pipe tobacco can bring a forty-year-old memory rushing forward.  So can the smell of incense.  

That year our family life had descended into chaos.  Our idyllic family façade was shattering.  We learned the smell of alcohol and attuned to signs of sudden outbursts.    

It was during this time that Walt Kelley decided to train my brother and I, as well as some of the other church kids, as acolytes.  This was a church boy’s dream.  Acolytes got to be up at the front of the church.  We got to carry lit candles and heavy crosses.  We got to be right at the center of the God stuff during communion.  

Walt Kelley’s acolyte club was a quiet and orderly place.  The only alcohol was kept for communion.  We learned to tie knots.  We learned the meaning of the slow liturgical dance we mirrored week to week.  We learned why there was always one candle burning in our church, and how to light, and extinguish, all the others.  

One day Walt took us to the cathedral.  We were there in rows, wrapped in cassocks, singing a hymn I don’t remember, when a man walked towards me with a smoking metal box.  His lips moved with an ancient prayer as he swung the box toward me.  My nose caught the sweet smoke, and for a moment that might have been an eternity, I found myself overwhelmed.  I was fully alert and yet utterly transfixed.  I was standing in a row, and yet somehow hovering overhead in the sweet aroma.  I’d never felt so secure and utterly terrified at the same moment before.  

Later I’d come to learn that incense has a long symbolic meaning in the Christian tradition.  Revelation uses incense as a symbol of the church’s prayer.  The sweet-smelling smoke that rises before God in this vision is no symbol of peace.  The prayers of the saints univocally cry out for justice in a world corrupted by bestial powers and suffering.  

I didn’t know how to pray in the chaotic and frightening family I found myself in.  For a few moments, the smell of incense and the ancient liturgy had prayed for me.  

It’s hard to pray today.  The soot and smoke of carpet bombing, and shelling fills the newsfeed.  Today a child, younger than I was in this memory, was pulled from rubble, a casualty of the cruel who masquerade as global leaders.  

I’m grateful for the smell of incense and the promise of Romans 8:26-27.

Likewise the Spirit helps us in our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but that very Spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for words. 27 And God, who searches the heart, knows what is the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints according to the will of God.

It’s no coincidence the smoking prayers of the church cry out for justice.  Perhaps, if we let ourselves, we can groan along with the Spirit as the smoke rises.  If we do, we just might find ourselves moved by the Spirit in ways we didn’t expect.