Our Fragile Selves & Unction

Lauren Winner recently coined the phrase "aromatheology" to describe Susan Ashbrook Harvey's Scenting Salvation, an account of Patristic worship and theology as being multi-sensory. What I like about the term is that it reminds us that our senses, made by our Creator, belong to our Creator. The pedagogical emphases on multi-media education need to transcend the pragmatic, as well as practice a careful discernment. The shape of a medium is its message, as Marshall MacLuhan used to warn us. The changes that each new technology brings to the human person are not de facto worthy of being embodied nor do they all guarantee good learning. Instead, they often contain a curriculum and a means of formation hidden in what they offer. Sound and sight, touch and taste, smell and our sense of gravity are another way our embodied existence must be understood for truly effective pedagogy And yet not just by using differing media for a media-glutted generation; rather, what is called for is a renewal of what our sensory faculty are actually for--the divine presence as meditated through the transcendentals of truth, goodness, and beauty. Can we consider a pedagogy of scent and touch?

For example, imagining our deaths and imagining our healing is what unction is about. The oil of anointing is a reminder of our dependence and our fragility. We are like smoke or the flowers of the field. To be anointed for healing is to engage in a meditation on our inutility. We cannot heal ourselves. We are even led to ponder our deaths. This contemplation of the dust of mortality is not Liebestot, the love of death and macabre culture. Instead, it is being before doing. This is an insight we need to return to on occasion in Christian education.

We exist first and foremost for the primary calling of Christ to himself. As Os Guinness puts it, "Calling is the truth that God calls us to himself so decisively that everything we are, everything we do, and everything we have is invested with a special devotion, dynamism, and direction lived out as a response to his summons and service." While I am not, of course, suggesting that every class begin with the physical anointing of our students' foreheads with oil (or ash)--amusing as that might be. I am suggesting that the physical, embodied nature of worship sacramentally prepares us for better encounters with the media of our classrooms, just as a worship that focuses solely on the inward experience of our students courts gnosticism and media deception, mistaking bells and whistles, sexy effects and sounds, for true transformative learning. We need to be sensitive to whether the aroma of our teaching is indeed a pleasing sacrifice to the nostrils of God.

This is as good a place as any to reflect on the place of prayer in learning--classroom, lab, in private, etcetera. Prayer is not a disavowal of the bodily life or the life of action, for contemplation and action are intimately tired together. A sacramental ethos of learning always stresses the participation and presence of learning, so our prayers in the classroom ought to be tied to the actual practice of teaching and learning we plan to undertake. They should not be vague, pious offerings that treat the spiritual life as somehow functionally divorced from learning. They should be recognitions of our utter dependence upon Christ the Logos for any real learning.