Incense

Incense is one of the oldest threads of continuity in biblical worship. The Law of Moses gave the Temple an altar of incense; St. Luke's Gospel opens with the priest Zacharias burning incense in the sanctuary "and the whole multitude of the people were praying without at the time of incense" (Luke 1:10). The prophet Malachi looked ahead to a day when "in every place incense shall be offered unto my name, and a pure offering" (Malachi 1:11) — a verse the Church has always read as a prophecy of its own worldwide worship. The Magi laid frankincense before the infant Christ, the gift for a God; and in the Revelation of St. John, heaven itself is fragrant, the smoke of the incense ascending before the throne with the prayers of the saints. A church that smells of incense is claiming its place in that single unbroken story.

There is honesty in admitting that the early Christians hesitated first. In the age of persecution, a pinch of incense offered before the emperor's image was the very token of apostasy, and believers died rather than offer it; incense could smell of the arena. But once the persecutions ended, the Church freely took back what the idols had borrowed: by the 380s the pilgrim Egeria describes censers filling the church of the Resurrection in Jerusalem with fragrance at the Sunday vigil. What was refused to a false god was restored to the true one.

Why smoke and scent at all? Because prayer has a body. Orthodox worship does not address disembodied minds: we stand, bow, kiss, sing, and smell, praying with the body as well as the soul. Rising smoke shows the eye what prayer is; fragrance reaches the one sense that cannot be closed. The tradition reads the sweetness as a sign of the Holy Spirit's grace and of the aroma of the Kingdom — worship you can breathe.

Church incense is built on frankincense — the hardened, tear-shaped resin of Boswellia trees, gathered much as it was in antiquity. Commonly the raw resin is ground, kneaded with fragrant oils — rose, jasmine, myrrh, and many others — rolled into small pellets, and dusted with a fine powder so the pieces do not stick together. Making incense is a craft, and in the Orthodox world it is especially a monastic one: the monasteries of Mount Athos are famous for it, and many parishes burn incense made by monks' hands. Recipes and fragrances vary endlessly; the burning coal beneath them, in the censer, stays the same.

Once you notice the incense, you can follow the services by your nose. The church is censed at Vespers during "Lord, I have cried" — while the choir sings the psalm's own words about incense; at Matins at the Magnificat and other appointed points; at the Divine Liturgy before the Gospel, at the Cherubic Hymn, and during the Anaphora; and abundantly at funerals and memorials, where the rising smoke keeps preaching hope over grief. The clergy cense the altar, the icons, and the people in order — God first, then His saints, then His living images. Details differ between jurisdictions and even parishes; the fragrance does not.

Incense is not confined to church. Many Orthodox homes keep a small hand censer at the icon corner, and censing the home — at evening prayers, at a house blessing, before a feast — is an ordinary lay practice, done with a quiet word of prayer. The same smoke that rises before the iconostasis rises before the family's icons, and the psalm covers both: let my prayer be set forth before Thee as incense.