The Odor of Sanctity

There are smells that come with a soundtrack.

Jasmine at dusk? That’s violins and questionable decisions. Honeysuckle? Bare feet and mosquito bites. Salt air? You’ve either fallen in love or forgotten to reapply sunscreen.

Smell doesn’t ask permission. It simply drags you backward through time by the nostrils.

Which is how, standing in a pharmacy beside the lip balm and lottery tickets, I was unexpectedly reunited with what I once believed was holiness.

Not incense.

Incense is obvious. Incense performs. It swings from a thurible like a smoky chandelier, announcing sanctity with bells and drama and a faint suggestion of bronchitis. Incense wants to be noticed.

The odor I remember was quieter. Sneakier. It slipped out of a forbidden hallway and found me hiding under the stairs.

My elementary school had a second-floor corridor that students were absolutely not allowed to enter. This was not a guideline. This was carved-in-stone, commandment-level forbidden.

That hallway led to the convent.

The nuns moved through the school like efficient weather systems—swishing habits, sensible shoes, eyes that could detect wrongdoing at fifty paces. But when they reached that door, they changed tempo. They opened it quickly. Slipped through. Closed it with surgical precision.

As if leaving it open too long might release something powerful.

Which, occasionally, it did.

I used to linger near the stairwell window facing that hallway. “Linger” is what you call trespassing when you’re still small enough to be cute.

And when that door opened—even for a breath—a cloud drifted out.

Sweet. Floral. Unfamiliar. Deeply mysterious.

I inhaled like a sinner with ambition.

The irony was delicious. I was encountering sanctity while actively committing a mild infraction. Yet I felt no guilt. No dread of confession. No fear of eternal consequences.

I just came back for more.

For decades, I tried to find that scent again.

Department store perfume counters did their best to suffocate me into enlightenment. Spritzers in black ambushed my wrists with atomizers. Everything smelled expensive and faintly competitive. Nothing matched.

I began to suspect I had imagined it entirely—that perhaps childhood had simply exaggerated ordinary air into something sacred. Memory is a notorious embellisher. It upgrades the mundane to miraculous without filing a permit.

Eventually reason tapped me on the shoulder: nuns were unlikely to be investing in French fragrance.

Still, the memory lingered. Smell always waits.

Adulthood rearranges childhood without asking.

When I replay that hallway now, I don’t see solemn guardians of divine mystery slipping into celestial retreat. I see young women. Some barely older than the eighth graders they supervised. Women who may have needed a bathroom break. A glass of water. Ten silent seconds without multiplication tables. A moment not to be responsible for anyone else’s salvation.

Under the habits were human beings—homesick, tired, maybe even questioning. The convent door wasn’t protecting heaven. It was protecting oxygen.

And perhaps that was the real miracle: not divine intervention, but ordinary endurance. The daily choosing to return to the classroom. The willingness to keep showing up in sensible shoes.

This realization makes me laugh every time.

The mystery solved itself in the least sacred of places: the checkout line at CVS.

There it was—a silver packet with purple lettering. Sen-Sen.

I opened it. Inhaled.

And the convent door flew open.

The sweetness wasn’t perfume. It was sharper. Cleaner. Slightly medicinal. The smell I had canonized all those years wasn’t fragrance at all. It was disinfectant-adjacent.

Naturally, I consulted Alexa.

“Was there a fragrant cleaning product commonly used in churches in the 1960s?”

“Jeyes Fluid,” she replied.

Of course.

A disinfectant. Used on floors, pews, corridors. Lavender-leaning. Entirely practical.

The Odor of Sanctity was mop water.

I expected disappointment. Instead, I felt admiration.

Because what I had interpreted as mystical transcendence was actually maintenance.

Care. Order. Attention.

Someone had cleaned that hallway. Someone had mopped those floors. Someone had made the place ready for the next day’s chaos.

My overly imaginative self had decided that was heaven.

Holiness, it turns out, may not be smoke and bells. It might be someone staying late with a bucket.

It might be gum in a silver wrapper.

It might be young women slipping through a door for a minute of quiet before returning to a room full of children armed with spelling lists.

It might be the quiet dignity of work no one applauds because it is expected. Floors don’t applaud the person who scrubs them. Classrooms don’t thank the hands that wipe their desks. Yet without that quiet work, nothing runs.

The scent I chased for decades was the smell of someone tending to what needed tending.

Which, frankly, is more impressive than perfume.

I think about that girl hiding near the window. She believed she was trespassing into sacred territory. What she was really doing was paying attention.

She noticed something unusual. She honored it. She returned for more.

That’s not sin. That’s curiosity.

If sanctity smells like disinfectant, then perhaps holiness is simply the evidence that someone cared enough to clean up before you arrived.

I have considered ordering a bottle of Jeyes Fluid just to see what would happen. I could mop the kitchen and wait for revelation. If Angels descend, I'll let you know.

But I don’t need to.

The lesson already landed.

Childhood gives things magic. Adulthood gives them wiring. And sometimes the wiring is funnier—and sturdier—than the miracle.

The Odor of Sanctity was never perfume.

It was effort.

And effort, it turns out, smells surprisingly good — even if it comes in a plastic bucket.

An earlier version of this essay was published on Quiet Roars by Helaine (Substack), February 2026. The present version has been revised.

BIO

Helaine Fiedler splits her time between cities and sandy shores. She writes humorous, reflective essays about everyday life, faith, family, and the small rituals that hold us together. Her work appears in literary journals and on her Substack, Quiet Roars, where she publishes daily. www.quietroarsbyhelaine.substack.com