Incense on the Mountain
Incense on the Mountain
Allison Huang
On the Aroma of Our Life’s Work
This essay is featured in Ekstasis Issue 10 Print Edition
I tied my hair back and proceeded to flip the hand-formed beef patties onto the heated pan. My fiancé had requested burgers for dinner. This country-bumpkin turned reluctant-city-slicker was winding his way downtown on the NYC subway at rush hour, so I sought to impress. The browning burger meat released a savory smell, a little gamey like blood and animal sweat and a little rich like rendered fat.
I did not mind the smell. It evoked life: a kitchen well-used, family around the dinner table, the pleasure of delicious food, the love of an attentive parent. It was the byproduct of daily, noble labor that nourishes bodies, provides structure to the day, and creates a venue for relationship.
Yet the women I admire often apologize for it. “Sorry it smells like my cooking,” said one minister’s wife as she welcomed us into her home. “Light some candles,” said my mother in Chinese after hosting dinner, “It smells like ‘oil smoke’ in here.” Belonging to a generation of women that sought to be more than homemakers, they appear reluctant to let on that they still find the making of food worthwhile.
The context of smell shapes our perception of it. All immigrant children know the dilemma: popping open the tupperware of their homecooked lunch releases all kinds of food stench that casts one as an outsider in the already precarious social setting of a school lunchroom. We beg mom to pack the nutrition-poor, ultra-processed Lunchables and Uncrustables instead.
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Curiously, aroma was noticeable to, and had even explicitly requested by, the God of Israel. The animal parts wholly consumed by the fire of the altar released a smoke said to be a “pleasing aroma to the Lord” (Leviticus 1). Lest we think that the smell was an unintended byproduct, the Lord explicitly required that grain offerings be perfumed with frankincense (Leviticus 2).
In its nature, fragrance is like spirit or presence. It fills a room. It cannot be seen. It transcends the material. When the Israelites failed to uphold the spirit of the law, the smell of their offerings—designed to be an aroma pleasing to God—became a stench (Jeremiah 6:20, Isaiah 1:11-15, Amos 5:21-23). What would lead the Lord to reject the incense offerings which he had requested from his people? They had failed to honor their just and holy God in their treatment of each other; they exploited the poor and built systems of inequity, worshiped idols and aggrandized themselves, practiced incest and imbibed stolen wine. “Even though you offer me your burnt offerings and grain offerings,” he says, “I will not accept them.”
When Noah offered burnt offerings to the Lord after being granted safe passage through the catastrophic flood, and “when the Lord smelled the pleasing aroma,” he “said in his heart, ‘I will never curse the ground because of man’” (Genesis 8:20-22). Somehow the smell stirred God’s resolve to be merciful. Stuck on this earth and separated from his God, Noah’s perfume somehow crossed into God’s realm.
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Thirty days from the point of writing this, I am to be married to a man I have loved for five years. Amidst the toilsome activity of planning a Christian ceremony and reception in Vermont and a Chinese wedding banquet, I often lose sight of what I should really be preparing for. Since I’ve never been married, I rinse and repeat what I already comprehend—logistics. I struggle to wrap my mind around the idea of a covenantal relationship with another human.
Yet a good marriage ought to be faithfully tilled, pruned, mulched, and cultivated season after season. God chooses the image and fragrance of a garden in this Song of Solomon.
He
How delightful is your love, my sister,
my bride!
How much more pleasing is your love
than wine,
and the fragrance of your perfume
more than any spice!
Your lips drop sweetness as the honey-
comb, my bride;
milk and honey are under your
tongue.
The fragrance of your garments
is like the fragrance of Lebanon.
You are a garden locked up, my sister,
my bride;
you are a spring enclosed, a sealed
fountain.
Your plants are an orchard of
pomegranates
with choice fruits,
with henna and nard,
nard and saffron,
calamus and cinnamon,
with every kind of incense tree,
with myrrh and aloes
and all the finest spices.
You are a garden fountain,
a well of flowing water
streaming down from Lebanon.
Awake, O north wind,
and come, O south wind!
Blow upon my garden,
let its spices flow.
She
Let my beloved come to his garden,
and eat its choicest fruits.
(Song of Solomon 4:10-15)
These lovers are close not only in body but in heart. Undoubtedly, the suntanned shepherd girl carries the stench of sweat, wool, animal dung, and dirt. Yet her smell is most pleasing because she is the only one in her lover’s eye, as the writer Aaron Sironi points out in the Journal of Biblical Counseling.
Coming from a culture that emphasizes duty, I always understood marriage as a co-parenting endeavor rather than the realization of heart attachment. Many of my Asian friends share the sentiment that our parents, though committed to the bitter end, cannot stand to be in the same room. Taking on the logistics of wedding planning or cooking dinner comes naturally. Pausing to revel in or behold the other—as the couple does in Song of Solomon—feels foreign.
To behold requires a frightening sort of intimacy. I have found myself putting distance between my fiancé and I by thinking in quid pro quos: What will he do for me given what I would do for him? Quantifying our relationship by the acts of service we exchange feels more manageable than becoming one flesh. But nobody wins this zero-sum game. As soon as I feel either side has failed to fulfill the terms of our “bargain,” I question whether we really love each other.
My shortsightedness applies to my relationship with God, too. We have, as Strahan Coleman puts it in Ecstatic, a “working relationship,” where worship centers on what I produce for God and God loves me for what I offer.
Beholding, on the other hand—as Coleman points out in his book by the same name—springs out of a loving relationship that cannot be shaken. “I love you because I love you,” says the covenantal God, “I AM WHO I AM.” Like inhaling a sweet fragrance, beholding requires sitting still and taking in, simply being in the presence of the other. Beholding is the luxurious result of being fully loved and assured that this love will never fade.
Earlier in the same chapter of Song of Solomon, the lover proclaims that until the day breaks and the shadows flee, he will go away to the mountain of myrrh and the hill of frankincense (Song of Songs 4:6). Given the context, the bride is the groom’s mountain of myrrh, the fragrant sanctuary to which he retires for the night.
The original hill of frankincense is the temple of Jerusalem. Set on higher ground, the temple of Jerusalem was the place God chose to dwell. Incense was to be offered as part of the ritual of meeting with God.
Yet the reference appears to be even older than the temple at Jerusalem. When God tested Abraham’s faith, he led Abraham and Isaac up a mountain in the land of Moriah. At the top of the mountain, God provided the substitutionary sacrifice in the form of a ram (a foil for Jesus) and spared Isaac from death, fulfilling his promise that Abraham’s descendants would be as numerous as stars. The etymology of the word “myrrh” is actually “mor,” suggesting that Abraham and Isaac had ascended and been spared on the mountain of myrrh. This pivotal, prophetic event anchors Jesus as the heart of the mountain of myrrh.
Jesus is the holy hill where the Israelites meet with God. He is the sheltered place where the lovers meet at night. He is the origin and Logos of all good things, including the aroma of true relationship.
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In Song of Solomon 4 (above), the female lover’s garden is filled with fragrant fruit. Her lover detects that it is the season for them to be married. His mouth waters for her. She is ready in another sense. Called “a garden fountain, a well of flowing water,” the woman is fertile.
In Proverbs 5, an attentive father uses the metaphor of “streams of water” to caution his son not to sleep around. “Drink water from your own cistern, running water from your own well. Should your springs overflow in the streets, your streams of water in the public squares?” (Proverbs 5:16-17). Springs or streams of water illustrate his sexual virility, cistern or well her fertility. And in a greater sense, fresh and flowing water symbolizes the potential to sustain life: The person who “meditates on [God’s] law day and night ‘is like a tree planted by streams of water, which yields its fruit in season’” (Psalm 1).
The female lover’s fruitfulness is intertwined with her fertility, and children are called the “fruit of the womb” (Psalm 127).
Unless the Lord builds the house,
those who build it labor in vain.
Unless the Lord watches over the city,
the watchman stays awake in vain.
It is in vain that you rise up early
and go late to rest,
eating the bread of anxious toil;
for he gives to his beloved sleep.
Behold, children are a heritage from
the Lord,
the fruit of the womb a reward.
Like arrows in the hand of a warrior
are the children of one’s youth.
Blessed is the man
who fills his quiver with them!
He shall not be put to shame
when he speaks with his enemies in the gate.
It seems at first that two unrelated ditties were smashed together in this Song of Ascent. The first half of the Psalm admonishes those who labor as if they can succeed apart from the Lord. The second half comments on the blessing of children. A scribal error maybe. But in fact, the halves are closely connected.
The first half lays out the sovereignty of the Lord. It moves out in concentric circles: One cannot build one’s house if the Lord is not building the house. One cannot preserve one’s city without the Lord protecting the city. God is not only in charge, he provides.
The second half of the Psalm zooms into the most basic building block of the Lord’s provision: children. In a culture where one’s land was passed down, children were the key to building the house. The Speaker of Ecclesiastes expresses the futility of toil due to the eventuality of death: “I hated all the things I had toiled for under the sun, because I must leave them to the one who comes after me. And who knows whether that person will be wise or foolish?” (Ecclesiastes 2). Children were hope-after-death, the heritage. In them, longevity and continuity seemed possible. Children were the reason toil would not be completely in vain.
Yet there is little sense among modern careerist women today that children are provision. Pregnancy is seen as a hapless accident. Children hinder our career progression. Caregiving becomes an “obstacle” to women’s rights: because employers expect women to leave the workplace to raise children, they tend to promote women less than their male counterparts. Women demand the right to “anxious toil.” We ask for on-site daycare options and employee flex programs so that we can be more present in the workplace.
Children are an obstacle to the toil because they very well might remedy it. When bearing children, we take part in the mysterious process of spawning the life of another human. No number of hours in the office earned us that ability. Having children requires submission to God’s authority: I will live out his timeless design instead of my own ten-year, self-aggrandizing plan. Having children brings an identity shift: I am not foremost a producer in the United States labor market, I am a creation abiding by the purpose determined by my creator.
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In early April (as I first write this), May blossoms were spurred to bloom by an unusual string of warm days. I am struck by God’s life-giving nature; every good thing is a miracle, every being alive only by sheer grace. To partake in bearing children is to abide in a life-giving God. To live according to his reality is to behold who he is.
When my fiancé first suggested that we have children soon after being married, I resisted for fear of the “career sacrifice” I would have to make. Since that time, I have built out customer notifications at one of the five largest banks in North America (there is likely a branch at your local mall). It is a young careerist’s dream: outsized influence on a key piece of technology that impacts millions of customers a day, interface with dozens of stakeholders a week, and accumulate both domain and delivery experience.
This leviathan of a company is striving to breathe new life into its customer and employee-facing technologies by modernizing its tech stacks—and failing badly. The poor planning and misaligned incentive structure make completing any work three times less effective than it could be. Humans are poor orchestrators at the size and complexity of firms like mine.
When I bang my head against the wall out of work frustration, I recall the writings of Joy Davidman, C.S. Lewis’ wife, in Smoke on the Mountain: An Interpretation of the Ten Commandments in Terms of Today: “It is not only the unemployed and unemployable who drain a nation’s wealth and give nothing in return. All performers of worthless work do that, even if they work themselves to death at it.” Worthwhile work is lifegiving work. Placing everything into proportion, I have stopped asking whether children are worth the sacrifice to my career and instead whether my career is worth the sacrifice to my children.
A customer notification engine impacts millions of people. But only one person is called to be the mother of my children. In the era of mass production, let me choose to love the few. Setting food on the table, clean linens on the bed, time aside to talk, rebuke and joke around—all these require a daily offering. Like fragrance, they can only be enjoyed in close proximity with those we love.
Allison Huang 黄德馨
Poet & Entrepreneur
Allison is a poet and entrepreneur who seeks to be and build in God’s upside-down kingdom.
Painting by Tom Dubois
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