Get a Whiff of This!

August 13, 2009 by djackson.

Phantosmia: an illusory sense of smell. It means that your nose hallucinates. Psychotics hear voices that aren’t there; phantosmiacs sniff scents that don’t exist. Or at least, scents that aren’t around any longer.

Often associated with psychological disorders such as schizophrenia, or physical maladies such as epilepsy, phantosmia can also occur in otherwise completely healthy people. Scientists don’t understand it all that well. Apparently the brain, which likes smells, thinks things have gotten too tame in the old olfactory and starts yanking some golden oldies off the shelves, going into reruns if you will. The problem here is that what comes most readily to mind are the strongest - as opposed to the most pleasant - aromas. Hence the sufferer more often noses the napalm of manure than the perfume of petunias.

Phantosmiac Jane G. Andrews, who has suffered from the condition for years, says it well in a recent article in the New York Times: “There’s nothing plainer than the nose on my face, but nothing more mysterious, either.” (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/11/health/11cases.html?_r=1&ref=views)

Smell may be the most intimate of the senses. As I understand it, the physical process involves microscopic bits of the thing you’re smelling actually wafting up the old nostrils and settling into waiting receptors. Scent, if this is correct, consists of internal physical contact with the source. Philosopher Martin Buber sees the force of this when he dismisses the usual formulas of greeting, worn smooth of all meaning by the steady current of habit, and commends instead the “ridiculous and sublime American variant, ‘Smell me!’”

There is sound theology in this business of smell. The Old Testament writers, fearless anthropomorphists to a man, never hesitate to describe sirloin sacrifices as a sort of aroma therapy to mellow out the Deity. The soothing scent of Noah’s offering softened God up on the question of future floods (Gn 8.21). Given the frequency of such language in the sacrificial regulations we can conclude that if the Lord does not eat, he does at least inhale.

The apostle Paul picks up on this idea in 2 Corinthians 2 where he likens the Christian life to the ticker-tape parade given a triumphant Roman general. The Romans really gassed it up with the incense on such occasions, and the participants in the procession consisted of two basic groups: soldiers who’d fought for the leader and now received their part in the reward, and soldiers who’d fought against him and could now look forward to execution, probably via a tet-a-tet with wild animals in the arena. Both could smell the incense; indeed, neither could choose but smell it. To the loyalists, however, the smell meant victory; to the rebels, it meant death.

“But thanks be to God,” Paul exclaims, “who always leads us in triumph in Christ, and manifests through us the sweet aroma of the knowledge of Him in every place.For we are a fragrance of Christ to God among those who are being saved and among those who are perishing; the one an aroma from death to death, to the other an aroma from life to life. And who is adequate for these things?” (2 Cor 2.14-16)

Interestingly enough, the word “aroma” which appears twice in this passage is the Greek osme, the root of our English word for that pesky, persistent sense of smell. If I give off the odor of Christ, the Scripture says, then my spiritual scent will haunt the hearts of all those I encounter. Some will wallow in worldliness like a skunk-sprayed dog, desperate to scrape off or cover up the musk that hints they’ve chosen the wrong side. Others will bathe themselves in the ether like a junior high kid with his dad’s aftershave. Either way our job is not to smell “good” or “bad,” but so to reek of redemption that we make phantosmaniacs of everyone I encounter, driving them nuts with the undying odor of the Savior.

How does one smell so strongly of Jesus as to overpower the blunt stench of self? It isn’t a spray-on deodorant repeatedly applied from without, but a nutrient constantly absorbed from within. I remember once during final exams my senior year in college when I went for a five-mile run and realized my sweat smelled like coffee. I’d been guzzling java furiously for days and what went in had finally found a way out. In the same way, if we drink deeply of living water it inevitably emerges when we sweat out our service, weep out our pain, and bleed out our sacrifice and suffering. This doesn’t happen with a quick spray-on application of Sunday’s sermon or a spritz of the newest devotional book behind each ear. It comes instead from the slow, steady chewing of God’s Word known as lectio divina, the the soaking silences and solitudes of spiritual discipline, and the unseen service offered only in the sight of Christ. And when that happens even those who fill their heads with logical arguments against the truth of the gospel find that the irrational apologetic of experience haunts their hearts with the uncomfortable idea that the whole thing may be true after all.

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