Sister Rosalie calls me “Rose the Nose.” That’s because I have an unusually acute sense of smell. While at times this has its benefits (such as noticing the fragrance of a dead mouse before it has had time to decompose to a totally disgusting state), it can also be an affliction (as when I am in distress because of an unpleasant odor which others don’t perceive at all).
So it was with some astonishment that I recently experienced life for several days without any sense of smell at all, due to a respiratory infection going around Gainesville. To be completely honest, astonishment is probably too weak a word. Although I know this sounds overly dramatic, I was very nearly in a state of panic. I realized for the first time how much I rely on scent to know the world around me, and I found myself asking repeatedly and pitifully, “What am I going to do if my sense of smell doesn’t return?”
In the spiritual life, there can be a comparable experience in the loss, not of a favored manner of connecting with our physical surroundings, but of our familiar way of relating to God — for example, when the form of prayer with which we are comfortable no longer seems to “work.” Feeling bereft, we can begin to panic, even to feel as if we have lost God.
Going Deeper
My sense of smell did return to normal. However, the loss of our manner of apprehending God’s presence is a different matter. Instead of returning to what we consider normal, we may find ourselves called to a new form of prayer or to a deeper way of being with God than what we formerly knew. In this case, to go back to how things were would be neither helpful nor possible. God calls us forward, drawing us closer through what sometimes feels like absence.
There is no need to panic when we find our spirits deprived of the tried and true. Trust God, talk to someone skilled in the spiritual life — and whatever you do, don’t stop praying, even if prayer appears for now to be leading nowhere.
Be still before the Lord, and wait patiently for him. (Psalm 37:7a)