Not far from where I live, a Yemeni coffee shop recently opened its doors.
The coffee is delicious. The pastries, phenomenal. But my favorite thing about the new coffee shop is the scent.
I don’t mean the normal beans-in-the-grinder, deep-roast scent of a typical coffee shop. That aroma is still present here, but it’s spiked with something else: a heady infusion of cardamom, cinnamon, ginger, nutmeg.
Every time I bring someone new with me, they comment on the spice-laden aroma the minute we walk in the door. “Oh,” I hear, “that smells so good. What is that?”
Aside from being pleasant, the scent serves as an invitation: to linger, to enjoy, to pull up a chair and stay for a while. A friend of mine, who frequents the coffee shop late at night with her family, talks about how it has become a local gathering place where families huddle up together to talk for hours over coffee or tea.
I thought about this yesterday, during our Ash Wednesday service.
I treasure Ash Wednesday, one of the times the church allows itself to fall fully silent and reckon with its own mortality and its own sin. The weight of the service lingers. The sacramental, sensorial aspect of this practice has always held meaning to me: the lingering quiet in a sanctuary, the slide of gritty ash between fingertips and forehead, the somber declaration: “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.”
But this year, to my surprise, I also encountered scent.
On being marked with the cross of ash, I breathed in air infused with a rich, fragrant scent. The intense, heady scent of it reminded me of walking into that coffee shop. It wasn’t until I was walking back to my seat, the perfume following me, I realized it must have been the oil used to mix the ashes.
This isn’t something I have encountered before. I don’t know what unguent my previous churches used to mix the ashes, but they carried no scent that I can recall. This was new. A blend to simulate frankincense and myrrh? The scent of incense from the ashes? I’m not sure. But it was lovely.
More than that, the scent served as a reminder of God’s grace.
Ash Wednesday can be a difficult service, for some. Reminders of death are everywhere: the emphasis on our fallenness, our brokenness, our frailty. Seeing the ashen cross on the foreheads of small children breaks the heart. But this is reality: death is inevitable, and with it, our reckoning.
And yet, and yet.
That sweet scent, mingling with all these bitter truths. Something lovely on the horizon of our smallness and the inevitability of dust. As though a Presence had passed by, leaving in His wake the perfume of His coming. A reminder, a promise, a recollection.
You are dust. But…
You will die. But…
You have sinned. But…
I Am, I Am, I Am.
I was struck last night by a gentleman who attended the Ash Wednesday service alone. He came in late, the church doors banging shut behind him, and shuffled into the pew in front of us. He still wore his EMS uniform; he fell right into the liturgy without bothering to pick up a bulletin.
And he spoke with fervor, pounding the pew with every responsive reading, booming his Amens and his Lord, hear our prayers. But during the ashes he wept, and at the end of the service bowed his head and prayed for a very long time with great intensity.
He prayed like it was a lifeline, like God was his lifeline, and he was not wrong. We all live in desperate, dying times. We have always all lived in desperate, dying times. Who, indeed, can save us from this body of death? God alone.
This year, Ash Wednesday and Lent come to me as a time of austere relief. 2025 has been a disorienting year so far, full of personal graces and sorrows, surprising times of trial coupled with surprising moments of joy. I struggle at times to recognize my country or the Christian faith I see some claiming in the name of Christ, yet we have found a comfortable church home for the time being. I feel less and less capable in the professional circumstances I find myself in, yet God provides all I need.
Lent provides both breath and break. Yes, a season of sacrifice: but one that invites you nearer to God, and one in which it is okay to slacken your grip and simply turn to Christ. There is a rest and a trust in this season that lingers in the air, much like that Ash Wednesday fragrance, all the way to Easter Sunday.
Breathe it in. Let it remind you of hope in death.
Samaritan's Song 