Dear Saints in Santa Fe and other far-off places,

Greetings in the name of Jesus Christ, whose stories reach us through all our senses, even smell.

It was the smell of honeysuckle on the hills that drew me back.

Three summers of my childhood in the 1960s were spent at San Francisco Theological Seminary (SFTS) in San Anselmo, CA, where my dad was pursuing a Doctorate in Sacred Theology, equivalent to a PhD.  My days were filled with pickup baseball games on a field by the playhouse, running around with other children of students and professors, taking trips to Muir Woods, Mt. Tamalpais, and across the Golden Gate Bridge to the city and Candlestick Park, going from one adventure to another.  Oh, and smelling the honeysuckle.

To me that’s what being Presbyterian was all about. It was fun. It seemed important.  It was beautiful (STFS is the most beautiful seminary in North America a professor there told me, and I agree).  It felt good and it smelled nice.

Only later did I learn being Presbyterian was hard work and a good way to live.  We confront issues of the day and learn to live in community.  We elect elders who govern the whole church (thankfully, clergy don’t do this!) and it is the session who decides the issues in a congregation after recommendations by committees.  Unlike other systems, the whole church doesn’t vote on everything we do.  We remember that “God alone is Lord of the conscience,” rejoice being a connectional church, and thrive when we include God in our life together.  The system works and works better than most.

But that came later, as did this orientation to a class this past week called “Spiritual Care and Trauma.”  It’s an on-line course from October to June.  I could have done the orientation online as well, but I needed to come back.  I needed to smell the honeysuckle again.  I have been searching for that smell since 1968 and never quite found it.

Until Monday morning.  I was walking up the steep hill to Scott Hall, a majestic stone-like castle of a building, to attend our first session.  It was the same honeysuckle hill I used to climb.  But I didn’t smell the honeysuckle.  Anywhere.

Then, there it was.  It literally turned my head like Moses who “turned aside” to see the burning bush.  It was beautiful with flowers greeting me, welcoming me back.  I breathed in the flowers and their essence and lingered with the aroma, imagining this is what God smells like.

I fully intended on ending my letter to you delighted that my pilgrimage led me back to this beloved smell, but there’s more to the story.  The following day I went back to smell the honeysuckle again, that burning bush of mine, but, lo and behold, the smell was no longer there. I went back the next day.  No smell still.  Was it my imagination or were the flowers apologizing?  Or perhaps they were reminding me that God doesn’t show up just so my story ends the way I want it to, nice and neat.  We never read that Moses kept returning to that place “beyond the wilderness” to see the bush burn again.  Once was enough to get him on his way.

So, with me and maybe with you.  God isn’t “back there” anymore in honeysuckle smells and old burning bushes but right here and now with more aromas to smell and other hills to climb.

Grace and peace,

Harry