Exploring the senses in an Eastern Orthodox Church
By Jenna Griffin
“What was from the beginning, what we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes, what we have looked at and touched with our hands, concerning the Word of life...” 1 John 1:1-2
The body is your beginning. Fingers cleave together, a physical manifestation of theological truth. Thumb, pointer, and middle meet in a peak, and suddenly you are holding the Trinity, the three persons of God. Ring and little fold down to the palm, and you have watched the two essences of Christ—fully human, fully God—descend to your plane of being. Up, down, across—cross-shaped blessing called to us by the movement of our fingers locked in shape.
In the beginning was creation; in the beginning was incarnation. Twin beginnings of the two Testaments—the spiritual and the physical as entwined as the fingers on the hand.
Angels and saints peer out from walls, from ceilings, from icons. Soft eyes, fragile faces, and features flattened into a suggestion of truth—not photographs, but windows. Not works of realism, but mirrors of it. What do you see beyond? What do you see within? Their bodies flicker next to yours in candlelight, reminders that human flesh can contain God.
Our physicality was not just set in motion by the divine hand—it was fully inhabited by the divine. Our bodies connect us to God because he created them and called them good. Our bodies connect us to God because he too had a body. The face of Christ could be the face of any man.
Prayers are sung, or chanted. Voices engaged with attention, ears opened to receive beauty. But the singing is not about talent, and therefore not about beauty as understood by skill, or perfection. It does not matter if the singers can sing well or not. It matters only that the singers make music with their bodies, their tongues, their lungs. You can set into movement the very air around you, spin unseeable waves into vibration. The waves enter your ears, reverberate through your bones, echo in the cavities of you. They touch your heart, and this is not only a metaphor.
(Your ears accept these waves until they sink into your heart.)
This is the visible tied to the invisible, the physical tied to the intangible. This is reaching out with spirit and body and accessing the divine through the very act of being a body.
You inhale the smoke of the incense and it’s like you can feel it on your tongue. They say that smell is the strongest to evoke memory, and yet it is perhaps the most elusive of the senses. Ephemeral, provocative, transitory in a way that makes you question its reality, but it too is honored. It is opened into a new understanding, a new way of being in the world. You breathe in the essence of something outside of you, and it imprints itself indelible on your mind.
Us, here and now. God, here and now. Why do we so often believe the lie that because something does not last forever, it is not important?
The Eucharist—thanksgiving. You can put God on your tongue and taste the divine in grape and grain. Jesus’s first miracle was water to wine, but the everlasting miracle is wine to blood. It is intimate, it is personal, it is becoming a part of you.
And if Christ was proof that the human body can hold the divine, the Eucharist is the reminder that our individual bodies can still hold it. And you keep holding it, keep holding it, keep holding on—with this body, with this breath, with this being, amen.