One of things that I love about Brew@2 (which happens every Tuesday in term time) is how seemingly separate strains of conversation oven converge in surprising ways. This semester we’ve invited anyone who is interested to add a topic of conversation into our ‘question teapot’. We then take it turns to take a slip of paper out of the teapot and see what anyone has to say about it.
A conversation from a couple of months ago has stayed with me all this time. I can’t precisely remember what the first question was, but a student was explaining to us the differences between perfume, eau de parfum, eau de toilette and cologne. This was educational for most of us, highlighting the differences in concentration of the different essences and how much they are diluted by water or alcohol.
My only experience of expensive perfumes so far has been to try them in Duty Free while waiting for a flight. I realised that I had probably actually never come across perfume in its most concentrated, heady form. We were all intrigued, wondering what that would be like.
The conversation then moved on to other topics but then another question came out of the teapot: “What do you think heaven is like?” We were, as usual, quite a mixture of people in terms of backgrounds and beliefs and we struggled at first to come up with answers that would make sense to those who didn’t share our assumptions.
But then, as conversations do, it circled back to what we were talking about before. What if heaven is like the most amazing concentration of beautiful aromas, more wonderful than we can even imagine? If so, we wondered, what if in this life we sometimes catch a little fruity, floral or aromatic whiff of what heaven is like?
As I’ve recently become a dog owner, I am acquainted on a regular basis with some of the less appealing smells that are in our lives even though commercial industries have equipped us with myriad ways to mask or get rid of smells that we don’t like. Life literally and metaphorically stinks sometimes.
Despite that, I wonder if our normal lives might contain hints of heaven; where we have seen beauty, experienced love, known wonder, felt our hearts fill unexpectedly with praise. If those things are just the equivalent of ‘cologne’ imagine what life in it’s most concentrated and pure form might be.
Paul uses a similar metaphor in the second letter to the Corinthians, saying that God, ‘through us spreads in every place the fragrance that comes from knowing him’ (2 Cor 2.14). Clues about what heaven might be like are everywhere, and you might just find them in the people you meet.
Karen Turner
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