Smells and bells.
We don't usually think much of smells and bells, but they were an important step in my coming back to faith in Christ in my mid-20's. How did that happen? Growing up in a conservative Southern Baptist church, I was given the wonderful gift of faith, and I am forever thankful for those wonderful, loving Christians that gave me the faith they received. However, I remember as a kid being troubled by the lack of a "physical-ness" in our worship services. This is not a critique of Baptist theology, by any stretch, but it is a part of my story and it is something with which I wrestled in my mind for a long time. Most of my family and friends are Baptists, and I'll always have that part of my faith with me.
But, I was left scratching my head why we didn't have candles, why images were seen as problematic and why there wasn't any incense or any bowing down to God in worship. There was no physical component whatsoever. As a matter of fact, any physical or material thing was shunned. All you needed was the Bible, the sinner's prayer and an altar call. After all, it didn't make any sense to me that "material" or "physical" things were "bad" or useless if God Himself called Creation "very good." (Genesis 1:31).
I had started reading the Bible beginning with Genesis, and I remember reading through the first five books of the Bible (also known as the Torah, which contains the Mosaic Law) and thinking to myself that the descriptions of worship that I was reading was not matching up with what I saw in our Baptist services. This caused me many doubts about my faith.
Fast forward to 2008. At this point, the lack of a "physical" component of worship puzzled me so much that I rejected Christianity wholesale. If we were mind, body, and soul... why wasn't there a physical component in worship? After all, weren't we redeemed by a Savior who took on human flesh? After a period of agnosticism, I began looking at Islam, Buddhism, and other religions for answers. I began to despair because of a lack of answers, so I did what I knew would work... I said probably the most fervent prayer of my life, asking for a sign to show me the answers to my questions. I was hungry to just know and settle the matter once and for all.
That was on a Friday night. On Saturday morning, I saw a YouTube video pop up on my feed. This was the video:
The Orthodox monks in the Egyptian monastery are chanting "Kyrie Eleison" (Lord have mercy) and prostrating on the ground. You can see the incense and hear the sounds of the chants and the mystical sounds of the cymbals and bells.
There it was... a Christianity that I had never seen or experienced before. This was a Christianity that I didn't even know existed at that point in my life. I decided to go check it out. I looked up the nearest Coptic (Egyptian) Orthodox Church and went the very next day to my first Divine Liturgy. I walked into a language that I did not understand, but what I did understand was the beauty. There was plenty of incense, people bowing and making the sign of the cross, icons adorning the walls, and people taking communion. A nice young lady saw that I was a newcomer and explained to me what was going on in the liturgy. She explained that the smoke of the incense symbolized our prayers rising to heaven and explained the sign of the cross as representative of the dual natures of Christ with two fingers touching the palm and three touching the head, heart, and shoulders.
Needless to say, I was hooked! I felt a fullness I had never felt, and what it felt like was that I was home, even though I couldn't understand but a few words of the Coptic and Arabic words of the liturgy.
That's how I came back to Christ in my mid-20s. I knew there was no going back. There are some other details that I'll mention in another post.
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