As the gig drew to a close the band got louder and louder until for about 10 minutes there was a continuous explosion of sound and light.  People started to cover their ears as the sound enveloped us.  As we were leaving my wife said to me, ‘Do you think that was meant to be an experience of a coma?’  The sound was so powerful it was disorientating, so powerful that we felt a level of detachment from the 500 or so other people in the room.

As I’ve reflected on the power of sound I’ve also found myself pondering about the noises that Christ heard on that journey into Jerusalem on that first Palm Sunday.  The cries of praise and the sounds of support - an expectant crowd praising their saviour.  I imagine that the noise was overwhelming.  As I write this post, on Maunday Thursday, I am aware of the same crowd making very different noises…I imagine that this noise was also overwhelming.

There is a story in the Bible about a prophet called Elijah.  Elijah is sat in a cave feeling suicidal, whilst in the cave God tells him that he is about to pass by and so to go outside.  Elijah goes outside and a strong wind passes by, followed by an almighty earthquake and then by a fire.  The sound of the these three must have been overwhelming for Elijah…but the Bible tells us that God was not in any of these.  Finally after this explosion of sound, there is the ‘sound of sheer silence’.  It is in this sound of sheer silence that Elijah hears the voice of God.

Spiritualized, the crowds that greeted Jesus, the sound of the fire, earthquake and wind offer an unusual level of sound intensity.  Sound is rarely that intense and often simply background noise that we don’t really focus on.  Let me suggest that you spend some moments now listening to those sounds around you, it maybe traffic passing by or perhaps it is the chattering of voices.  Whatever the noises listen to them and appreciate them, they are the normal soundscape of your life.  In the normal and ordinary, the extraordinary will be found if we seek and remain attentive.  It is in the ordinary that we will hear the still small voice of God.

Within 10 minutes I was sucking on a lemon, amazed at how sweet it was and drinking Guinness, which tasted like chocolate! My taste buds had been fooled.  However, after about 30 minutes I wanted a glass of wine. I poured myself a glass of Sauvignon Blanc and took a sip.  It was repulsive and so I had to wait until the effects of the Miracle Fruit Tablets had worn off before I could drink again.  After chatting with friends, we all agreed that whilst it was fun to suck on lemons we did actually prefer our usual sense of taste.  

I missed my sense of taste during these moments and, once back, I relished the return of normal taste.  As I have reflected on taste and read the story of the Last Supper, the final meal that Jesus ate with his disciples, I have started to wonder how the meal tasted?  Did the thought of what was to come prevent Jesus from eating the Passover meal?  Or as he ate the meal did it remind him of God’s faithfulness in the past and hence reassure him of God’s faithfulness in the future.

The meal was one full of many tastes, such as bitter herbs symbolizing the harshness and sharpness of the slavery in Egypt or Charoset, a sweet brown pebbly mixture reminding the Israelites of the mortar used to build the storehouses in Egypt. Many different tastes, all telling a different aspect of an important story.  This was a way of remembering a story vital to the Jewish people, different tastes that remind them of different parts of their collective story.  Taste can serve to evoke powerful memories.

I wonder if different tastes evoke powerful memories for you?  As a Christian, if my eyes were covered and I were given a sip of wine and some bread it would remind me of that last supper that Jesus shared with his disciples.  A taste that reminds me of a meal shared by the Son of God with his closest friends.  A taste that contains within it a story that has changed the world.

First of all, may I say that I welcome whole-heartedly a renewed vision of a unified, embodied response to spirituality that we are seeing in the West. It’s long overdue after so many centuries of compartmentalising our lives into spiritual and non, sacred and secular. I understand why this line of thinking may have developed, but we ventured too far along that path. Somewhat of a return to the centre is necessary as a counter-balance, without becoming out-of-kilter once again in our search for the new, unknown or forgotten. Some may scoff or reel with suspicion at this movement. But, we need go no further than the recognition that the Creator made for us these wonderful bodies to experience life on this beautiful mess of an orb called Earth. There is after all, for those Platonically-inclined Faithful, a difference between the Soma and the Sarke. So, touch, in all of it’s complexity is where our journey has brought us this week.

There is no doubt that touch plays a significant role in our lives as human beings. From the earliest moments of our existence to our dying day, touch features as a prominent catalyst in our experience and formation as individuals. There has been much research done on this field of study, but even from our own personal experiences, we can attest to the influence and impact of touch - particularly within human relationships. Other studies have made human / animal relationships the focus of their efforts and have revealed the extremely positive affect animals have made in the lives of sick children in hospital or the elderly in retirement centres. Additionally, the development of new born infants and very young children is heavily influenced by the presence and consistency of comforting touch. Professor Darwin Muir of Queen’s University in Ontario, Canada has stated in a paper entitled, Adult Communications with Infants through Touch: The Forgotten Sense that “. . in humans the skin is the largest sensory organ, it is the first sensory system to develop in the uterus, the fetus receives extensive prenatal stimulation, and infants learn by touch at birth.” It’s obvious that we are communal creatures in need of reassuring, positive, regular touch from one another.

I was particularly moved by the image used at the beginning of this week’s guided Lenten reflection on the Churches Together in Britain and Ireland site. It’s of an infant’s hand grasping the finger of an adult - presumably its parent. It caught my attention because this week - God willing - I will become a parent . . for the third time. My wife has done such a fantastic job of creating wonderful little people that we desired to bring yet another into the family. Now, I thought that being a father would be cool, but in actuality, being a dad has been pure awesomeness! The experience of fatherhood has entailed all of the usual lack of sleep, dirty nappies and constant care that parents experience, but the connection and satisfaction of investing oneself in entirely new people who have the adventure of life ahead of them is exhilarating. So it is with great anticipation and hope that I begin gearing myself (and my wife of course!) up for yet another arrival; waiting to touch the little person I’ve been speaking to for months and hold the individual that is at the fore of their unfolding story. What wonder and mystery in it all! For me, it’s the ability to touch and hold my new child that ‘seals the deal’ and makes the arrival final. Up til now I have been imagining who this individual is, what they will look like and how it will feel having them in the family. The wait is almost over. This child will know his/her mother and father, brother and sister, primarily from the touch we give.

In reflecting on our five basic senses which constitute our primary interaction with our world, it seems to me that out of all of them, touch is the most significant. Not one of us would desire to be without any of them (although so many in our world live in such a way), but if we discerned the impact that each one - sight, smell, taste, hearing and touch - has upon us, I think our use of touch demonstrates its primacy. Sight and hearing are our most utilised senses. We take in everything - whether we process it or not - when our eyes and ears are open. In fact, when we sleep our sense of hearing is the sole function that never fully ceases to operate. Our eyes take in all that is set before them, often more than we are aware of as Jonny Baker illustrated in his post on Journey Into Seeing. Our sense of smell is limited by proximity to the source of the scent, and taste is even more limited to being in actual contact with the object of desire. Touch is unique in that it is the most identifiably employed sense when drawing our circles of relationship.

You can tell how ‘close’ someone is to another person by watching how they interact with one another through the use of touch. We assume that if two people allow their faces to touch they are either very close friends, family or lovers. We know by ‘how’ people touch (and in what place on their bodies) what type of relationship they have with one another. It’s not a perfect method of discerning the nature of relationships, but it is largely true that those we dislike or distrust we keep our distance from, those we only know as an acquaintance we limit to a handshake or ‘hello’ and those we partner with are allowed access that no one else is entitled to. This is painfully illustrated in the reality of relationships that have disintegrated due to trust and intimacy being violated through the giving of oneself (often, but not exclusively, through touch) to someone other than our partner. The most powerful, influential aspects of our human nature are those most misused and abused. Touch is no exception.

From the Christian understanding of God, we come to learn something very significant about touch and our bodily home. God embodied Himself in human form, wrapping Himself in flesh and became one of us. Subject to all of the same experiences of humanity, Jesus Christ felt pleasure, pain and the full spectrum of sensations in between. There are no shortage of examples in the Scriptures of Jesus intentionally touching people He encountered. He welcomed friends - the socially elite and the socially excluded - all in the same gesture of inclusion. His touch extended to all who came to Him for reassurance, healing or freedom. It was through Jesus’ touch that the Kingdom that He often spoke of revealed itself. We know too from the reading in Mark chapter 14 in this week’s study guide that Jesus felt the crushing blow of betrayal which led to His arrest. Judas Iscariot, arriving with a contingent of armed guards, identified Jesus to them by use of a gesture that is reserved for friends - a kiss. The act, one of relational intimacy, was turned on its head as something utilised for apparently selfish gain. This was, in essence, a ‘heartless’ act. A sign of intimacy enacted to detract from, and not bless, the recipient.

There is real beauty in the truth that God chooses to communicate to us through the lives of others. Each one of us has the ability and opportunity to join with God in His work of caring for and redeeming creation through acts of love to our fellow human beings. Service in any shape is an appropriate form of love when we see a need we can meet and we do something about it. Not to be lost in more obvious acts, we should never underestimate the power in a simple reassuring touch, aptly timed, to bring light into someone’s life. Just as in the ‘Free Hugs’ campaign by Australian Juan Mann, something so simple can make the world of difference to another. Life lived in the service of others offers the kind of feeling when you know that all is right in your world. Not that all is well and good in the world necessarily, but that all is right in your world. There is joy in the journey and hope along the way. This is a gift only God Himself can give. Jesus has shown us how to receive it in the example set in word and deed for all eternity.

So what aspects of smell might enable us to explore God? Earlier this week I sat with two friends in London, ruminating over this as we ate dinner together. Whether it was the smell of the food, or of the environment we were in, we had no difficulty keeping the conversation going for a considerable length of time. It so happened that the news that day had been dominated by the trial of Josef Fritzl, and the prosecutor opened the case by passing round the jury pieces of fabric taken from the dungeon where he imprisoned his daughter, so they could smell what the place was like.

We all had our own recollections of visits to musty castles and ancient monuments, and the sort of damp smells found there, evoking memories of eeriness and isolation as well as torture and injustice. We also remembered smells connected with having fun. Visitors to the House of Bols in Amsterdam can play with 36 puffers each of which creates a distinctive smell. The game is to guess what they are (all of them flavours of Bols liqueurs): one person got almost all of them right away, while another scarcely guessed any correctly. Realizing that we actually smell things in different ways helped to explain why when one person says, ‘There’s a funny smell round here’ another might wonder what the fuss is about because they can’t smell it at all.

House of Bols

Then we also talked about the different smells we meet in different countries around the world. The Tropics smell quite different from northern Europe, and islands smell different from cities. Even two cities can have quite a different smell from one another. In the present critical financial climate many people can smell death, destruction, and decay - scents that echo with our journey through Lent, as we work out how we might get back to the core of those things that really matter. Of course, we already know the end of the Easter story and that makes it hard not to race ahead to Easter Day. Perhaps in the midst of so much turmoil we should slow down and sniff out signs of resurrection. I wonder what resurrection would smell like? Would we recognize it if we did smell it?We ended up making a list of good smells and bad smells. The good included flowers, earth, newly-mown grass, along with herbs and spices, fresh bread or food, recently ironed clothes, a baby just bathed, perfume - while bad smells included fire and smoke, mould, rubbish, and the smell of poverty and battle. There again, the two categories are not absolutely fixed, and for someone who was lost the smell of smoke could be a sign that help might be at hand, in the form of a house or a fellow traveller. Disinfectant is another one that could fit into both categories - or the smell of the dentist or hospital, that can be bad news and good news all at the same time. And what about the smell of the school we went to? So much of our understanding of smell depends on the associations that different places have for us. That’s why talking about this with others was such a good way for me to explore this topic, because we all have our different ways of experiencing life through the senses. But we were all agreed on one question: I wonder what God smells like? And whether the smell of church reflects who God is. And how any of that connects with the smell of resurrection. And how those smells might motivate us to become agents of change in our local communities.

How do we tell the difference between Max the Cat and a ravening Lion seeking whom he may devour? Some parts of our brains log what we are perceiving, and other parts tell us what it is, and cross-reference other experiences we have had, and tell us what do about them.

That sounds logical, but the order’s wrong. The part that stimulates fight or flight isn’t the last bit, but the first bit after the content has been logged. Is the furry animal friend or foe? Wondering which stimulates our curiosity, and we become intensely attentive. In the space between perception and our basic instincts our senses are stimulated intensely, we focus on it, and try to think what it could really be. This is teh zone in which fear births pernicious fantasy, that stimulates more fear, that leads to genocide. These processes are very much hardwired into us all. We can’t really experience anything good or bad without using our imaginations.

But what if imagination fails? Then we become stuck and stupid, vulnerable to all kinds of deception, including damaging fantasy about ourselves. Jesus was continually stirring people’s imagination in the things he said and did, and the stories he told. The Jerusalem establishment had a fixed idea of itself as right and safe as houses — this kind of thinking that prevented the priest and levite doing anything to help the mugging victim helped by the good Samaritan helped. Lack of imagination made the younger brother think he had not home or loving father, and his brother think he was hard done by. It was lack of imagination, as much as lack of faith, that made doubting Thomas doubt.
Mark Twain pointed out that what makes us dumb isn’t what we don’t know but what we think we do know, but it’s wrong. What new ways of seeing things could break through our stupidities? What fresh vision of something ordinary would unlock another picture of ourselves, or even a vision of God on which we could take a punt of everything?

Norman MacCaig shows the way in his poem

An Ordinary Day

I took my mind a walk
Or my mind took me a walk —
Whichever was the truth of it.

The light glittered on the water
Or the water glittered in the light.
Cormorants stood on a tidal rock

With their wings spread out,
Stopping no traffic. Various ducks
Shilly-shallied here and there

On the shilly-shallying water.
An occasional gull yelped. Small flowers
Were doing their level best

To bring to their kerb bees like
Aerial charabancs. Long weeds n the clear
Water did Eastern dances, unregarded

By shoals of darning needles. A cow
Started a moo but thought
Better of it… And my feet took me home

And my mind observed to me,
Or  to it, how ordinary
Extraordinary things are or

How extraordinary ordinary
Things are, like the nature of the mind
And the process of observing.

Later this week, the Rt Rev Alan Wilson, Bishop of Buckingham, will give his reflections on the Journey into imagination.