Coming to my senses

Churches Weekly Newsletter, 28 August 2022

I have been acting senselessly this week. "What, even more than usual?" you might ask. Yes, inasmuch as I've joined the many who have discovered that having Covid means losing all sense of smell and taste. These are two senses which I have undervalued until this recent experience of losing them. It's disconcerting and frustrating having to postpone the pleasures of sampling those Mugicha cold barley teas and Yamagata peach candies I brought back from Sendai, and also having to postpone the delight of breathing in the Yorkshire air again: even on those days when (I'm told) the less pleasant odours are emanating from the fields. 
This - hopefully only temporary - loss helps me appreciate all the more those senses we have and the way they each add layers to our experience of life; it gives me more insight into the challenges daily addressed by  those who have permanently lost a sense, the feeling of exclusion they must face.
We all know people who, having lost the use of one sense, have remarkably compensated by developing another sense in unforseen ways. Whenever such people tell their redemptive stories, they share good news, says Jesus: "Go and tell John that the blind see, the lame walk, the deaf hear, the dead are raised and the poor preach the gospel", he says.
An old Scottish prayer at the start of the day begins with these words:
"Bless to me, O God, each thing mine eye sees;
Bless to me, O God, each sound mine ear hears;
Bless to me, O God, each odour that goes to my nostrils; 
Bless to me, O God, each taste that goes to my lips..." (Alexander Carmichael, ed, Carmina Gadelica: Hymns and Incantations from the Gaelic).
I always take inspiration from these words, even whilst questioning how it can be possible that some particularly bad sights, sounds, tastes, smells, can bring blessing. But it ispossible.
The wonderful writer Frederick Buechner, who died on August 15 aged 96, always managed to find heaven in the ordinary things of life, the spiritual in the physical. In Now and Then: A Memoir of Vocation, he offers the following sage advice which you'll notice embraces all the senses. It's an encouragement to us to always cherish the sensual - as fully as you are able to: “Listen to your life. See it for the fathomless mystery it is. In the boredom and pain of it, no less than in the excitement and gladness: touch, taste, smell your way to the holy and hidden heart of it, because in the last analysis all moments are key moments, and life itself is grace.”