I can't smell lilacs without...
Illustration
Object:
I can't smell lilacs without thinking of myself as a schoolboy stepping from my parents' house and walking past the blooming lilacs. One smell and it's a spring morning and I'm young again, walking beyond the lawn and onto the street to catch the school bus. But more happens. I then think of the poem I was learning in high school: Walt Whitman's "When Lilacs Last in the Door-yard Bloom'd," his poetic weeping for the death of Abraham Lincoln who was assassinated when the lilacs bloomed: April 14, 1865.
Smells, tastes, sounds, and especially songs and poems bring instant associations to our minds, as when we come to our Lord's table: smell of wine and bread, familiar words from our Lord. We immediately do what Jesus commands us: remember our leader who was executed in the spring. Here at this table we do more than remember or mourn, we pray and rejoice. Our leader is risen.
Smells, tastes, sounds, and especially songs and poems bring instant associations to our minds, as when we come to our Lord's table: smell of wine and bread, familiar words from our Lord. We immediately do what Jesus commands us: remember our leader who was executed in the spring. Here at this table we do more than remember or mourn, we pray and rejoice. Our leader is risen.
