It Just Makes Sense

          In the early 1950s, Dr. Donald Hebb, a professor of psychology at Montreal’s McGill University, studied the effects of sensory deprivation on the human condition.  With a $10,000 grant in hand, Dr. Hebb offered male graduate students $20 a day to live in small, bare chambers containing little more than a bed.  They wore tubes on their arms and gloves on their hands to limit their sense of touch; a U-shaped pillow covered their ears to block out sound.  Dr. Hebb planned to observe his subjects for six weeks.  None lasted more than a few days.[1]  It turns out that our senses play an important role in our physical and mental well-being.  So it just makes sense that our senses play a critical role in our spiritual well-being as well.  Today’s readings prove it. 

          Did you notice that today’s readings invoke each of the five senses?  In our first reading, Elijah is revived from the brink of death by the touch of an angel who gives him food for his journey to Mount Horeb to meet God.  Our psalm invites us to “taste and see the goodness of the Lord” and ensures us that the lowly will hear him and be glad.  In his letter to the Ephesians, Saint Paul encourages us to be like Christ, a fragrant aroma pleasing to God.  And in our Gospel passage, Jesus teaches us that he himself, his very flesh that we can see and hear and touch and smell and taste, is the bread for the life of the world.  The invocation of the senses in Scripture calls to mind “the powerful immediacy of experiencing God’s beneficence.”[2]  God’s goodness is visible, audible, tangible, tasteable and olfactible (I had to look that one up – smellable just didn’t sound right).

          Scripture is filled with passages that invoke the senses because God communicates with us through every means possible.  The five senses serve as “the chief inlets of the Soul,”[3] gateways through which we connect physical realities with spiritual realities.  The senses offer us physical, mental and spiritual stimulation that help us experience the fullness of our humanity.  Through the senses we delight in God’s creation.  The senses help us discern God’s loving presence in our lives and in the world around us.  Our senses are the portals through which we receive the good things that God offers us.  They help us make sense of the interplay between the human and the divine so we can be in a loving relationship with our God.

          It should be no surprise, then, that Catholicism is a religion of the senses, the smells and the bells, if you will.  Just think about it, as Christians we believe that the world was created through God’s Word and that . . . [t]his same Word that holds the Father and Creation in communion has become flesh, visible, audible, and tangible in Jesus.”[4]  We believe in the One who gave sight to the blind, hearing to the deaf, who touched the leper, fed the multitudes and washed the smelly feet of his followers.  Catholicism involves all five senses because Jesus’ life and ministry involved all five senses.  We see beautiful icons and images in Church that inspire us to see the face of God in our fellow man; we hear the tolling of bells that compels us to hear the cry of the poor; we anoint ourselves with holy water and the sign of the cross so that we can touch our neighbor with the sign of peace; we taste the elements of bread and wine as we receive our Lord in Holy Communion to strengthen us for our mission to bring food to the hungry and drink to the thirsty; we smell the fragrant aroma of incense that lifts our prayers for all who suffer in squalor and stench.  Ours is a living, breathing, active faith that involves our bodies, our minds, our souls and all five senses. 

          It just makes sense that we should rely on our senses to find God’s loving presence in our lives.  God is present in every sight, sound, touch, taste and smell around us.  We see God’s grandeur in the gnarly mountain tops capped with snow.  We hear God’s voice in the persistent hum of cicadas on a hot August day.  We touch God’s face as we caress the time-honored hands of our parents and grandparents.  We taste God’s goodness in a favorite meal prepared just for us by a loved one.  We smell God’s enigmatic Spirit in the briny mist of the Jersey shore. 

Our humanity breaks down when we deny the reality of God’s presence in every aspect of our lives.  That’s why some of the wealthiest, most famous and accomplished people in our society are so miserable.  They have every physical stimulus available to them, but they suffer from spiritual deprivation because they refuse to taste and see and hear and touch and smell God’s loving presence in their lives.  When we tune our senses to God, we find him, and we live as God intended us to live – knowing, sensing with every fiber of our being that we are fully alive and fully loved in communion with God forever.

          After just a few days of isolation from nearly all sensory stimulation, Dr. Hebb’s volunteers couldn’t think clearly about anything for any length of time.  They showed signs of cognitive impairment and “experienced extreme restlessness, childish emotional responses and vivid hallucinations.”[5]  After just a few days of sensory deprivation, Dr. Hebb’s subjects were mentally and emotionally broken.  Well, it doesn’t take a $10,000 grant to figure out that the same happens with our souls.  When we deprive ourselves of God’s presence in our lives, we become restless, dissatisfied, hopeless, selfish, and we lose perspective on right and wrong.  We become spiritually broken.  To be mentally, physically and spiritually healthy, we need to feed our minds, our bodies and our souls.  We need to taste and see and hear and touch and smell all of the good things God offers us.  It just makes sense.

Readings:  1 Kings 19: 4-8; Psalm 34; Ephesians 4: 30-5: 2; John 6: 41-51

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[1] Michael Mechanic, “What Extreme Isolation Does to Your Mind,” Mother Jones (October 18, 2012) at 1-2, http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/10/donald-o-hebb-effects-extreme-isolation.

[2] Robert Alter, The Book of Psalms (New York, W.W. Norton & Company, 2007) at 118.

[3] William Blake, “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell” (1790).

[4] John Shea, Eating With the Bridegroom:  The Spiritual Wisdom of the Gospels for Christian Preachers and Teachers, Mark Year B (Collegeville, Liturgical Press, 2005) at 203.

[5] Mechanic at 3.