A number of years ago, when I was researching the book “Julian’s Cell,” (a fictional biography of the mystic Julian of Norwich) I needed to know what the process of tanning hides smelled like.

So I phoned up a company that tanned hides and a cheerful person named Debbie answered the phone. “I don’t quite know how to ask this,” I said, “but I’m working on a book about a medieval mystic and I need to know about tanning hides. I need to know what it smells like. So I’m asking if I can come over and smell your place.”

Debbie hooted with laughter. I was glad, because that makes this kind of thing much easier. “Sure,” she said. “C’mon over. Come and give us a sniff.”

That little bit of research didn’t get me what I needed. Their modern process was all sanitary and relatively odorless. I since learned that medieval tanners use a fermenting stew made up of human and dog feces and urine, and they tested the mix by tasting it.

Driving back from my visit with Debbie and her co-workers, I thought how smell is the most primitive of our senses. We get very defensive or angry if someone says we smell. You can tell me I’m ugly and my taste in clothes is abominable, and I might be a bit miffed. But if you tell me I stink, well, I might say or do something I’d regret.

Fortunately, or perhaps unfortunately, we’ve managed to deodorize ourselves and our world so completely; we hardly use the old sniffer except to smell food. I wonder if we’ve lost something.

Our sense of smell is deeply connected to our emotions. I remember how one friend became almost hysterical when she smelled ammonia, because that is what she had smelled when her ex-husband had tried to strangle her. I asked a medical friend about that. He said people in crises often think they smell ammonia. Then I remember how I whonked my noggin a few years ago, and I smelled ammonia.

In my denomination, we worship God almost entirely with our ears and our mouths. Gradually, we are beginning to be fed through our eyes, as more and more fine art appears in our churches.

As for the sense of taste, well there’s communion which in my tradition tends to be dried cubes of bread and diluted grape juice. If we worship God through our sense of taste, it’s at the congregational dinners.

Smell? Only occasionally do we do something with smell. I remember the delighted look on peoples faces the time I set up my bread machine in the sanctuary, so that it would start its work in the middle of the night and would just finish baking as people arrived. New bread for communion!

“Worship God in the beauty of holiness,” says the psalmist. Beauty comes to us through all our senses.

From Ralph Milton’s E-zine for people of faith with a sense of humor, Feb. 5, 2006 (see right column on how to subscribe)