Fragrance Industry (Bright Year: Day 39)

You’re not alone, tree guy. The fragrance industry does north of $30 billion each year, deluging us with perfumes, aromatherapies, scented candles, the million smells. Wherefore the dangly car trees, how they multiply.

It’s not clear to me why we do this to ourselves. Is it really that neutral smells bother us so? Or is it that we are most comfortable stewing in the nostalgic?

”It is I myself,” says the risen Jesus to His disciples (Luke 24:39). Not a ghost. Not a memory. Not a lingering leftover. “It is I myself.” Sadly, misunderstandings of the risen Christ persist. We speak of Him like a fragrance. So the 19th century theologian David Strauss spoke of “the earliest Christian consciousness”; so the 20th century theologian John Knox called the resurrection “the memory of Jesus himself.” That was the gist of the sermons last Easter which spoke of the resurrection as your renewed sense of the presence of God.

But fragrances are not the risen Christ. He is the real thing amidst our religion. He is the forest.