The Anglican Church of Canada smudging the altar

Today, most people think that Christianity is a collection of antique superstitions no longer fit to be taken seriously by anyone whose reasoning faculties are intact.

This is not true, of course. Christianity is perfectly rational: it has its own set of presuppositions, none of which are less plausible than an atheist’s presumption that God does not exist. The Anglican Church of Canada has its heart set on changing all that: it is busy polluting the elegant inner coherence of Christian belief with vacuous rites whose meaning would stretch the credulity of anyone but an ACoC priest beyond the breaking point.

From here:

As we gathered in the chapel to celebrate Eucharist, our friend and colleague Barbara was preparing to smudge the altar. In attempting to light her sweetgrass braid from the altar candle, she held it too close to the flame and for a moment too long, and the flame sputtered and died.

Well, one of the very best things about extinguishing beeswax candles, as many of us know, is the rich honey scent that the smoke carries across a space as it disperses from the tiny flame into the wide world and then vanishes.

It turns out that at the moment that Barbara’s sweetgrass braid put out the flame, an ember appeared on its tip. Its smoldering smoke joined that of the spreading honey-scented beeswax as Barbara slowly circled the altar. The blending of smoke from sweetgrass and smoke from beeswax filled the space with what you might call a providential aroma; both sweetgrass and beeswax were there, but so was something else, something at once brand new and ancient, the aroma of encounter, partnership, hope.

More like the stink of nonsense.