As Matt and I have been exploring the concept of the sacred and the profane, I've been looking for physical objects or locations I can use as analogies for the concepts. One idea is churches turned into bars or restaurants. After scouring the web I found one in Nottingham, England—the Pitcher & Piano.
The building, constructed in 1876, is a High Gothic Cathedral style church that was converted into a bar in 1998. The pictures are jarring (Google them). A beautiful, high ceiling structure which evokes feelings of awe within the setting of a bar. Perfect for my reflection. As I dug into the history of the building, more and more jumped out to me. I'll be writing about this research in a couple of posts this week, but for now I'd like to focus on some deep dives I did on the smells a place like this may have.
This is speculation (I've never been to Nottingham, much less this bar), but I began to wonder what kinds of smells compete in a place like this. I imagine a war between the ghostlike aroma of the church that was, and the biological reality of the bar that is.
The Sacred Smell of Decay
The Pitcher & Piano was built in 1876, right in the middle of a revolution in paper production. For centuries prior, paper was made from cotton rags (a durable, acid-free material). But to satisfy the exploding demand for newspapers and dime novels, manufacturers switched to wood pulp.
Wood pulp contains lignin, a chemical that provides structure to trees. But lignin is unstable. As it breaks down and oxidizes over the decades, it degrades into distinct chemical compounds. One of those compounds is vanillin.
This is why old libraries and antique bookstores smell so good. You are literally smelling the decomposition of the printed word. In my "mind’s nose," the upper rafters of the Pitcher & Piano still hold that faint, sweet scent of vanilla—the scent of a thousand hymnals turning to dust.
The Profane Smell of the Bar
But look down at the floor, and the chemistry changes. While the ghost of the church smells like aromatic heaven, the reality of the bar smells like... feet.
These rubber mats, damp and warm, act like a sweaty rubber boot. The spilled beer naturally sours into a foul smelling liquid, much like dirty feet, because bacteria break down the leucine-rich liquid into Isovaleric Acid. This acid is the exact same compound responsible for the bad smell of toe jam under human toenails (sorry for the disgusting detail). Drains and floor mats in bars are almost identical with the bacterial environment of smelly feet.
On top of this, any carpets will produce another off smell. Beer contains a small amount of fat. When it spills onto carpets or wood floors, those fats go rancid and release another acid, Butyric Acid. It smells like vomit.
There is a deep irony in this war of smells in the Pitcher & Piano. We tend to associate holiness with sweetness, with life, while we associate the profane with filth and death. But in the Pitcher & Piano, the sweetness is a symptom of death (the chemical breakdown of a structure that has ceased to be useful, a ghost of a bygone age). The stench of the bar, however, is a symptom of life (the biological byproduct of gathering, drinking, and being human).
Touching the Profane in our Age
In many ways, this bar is a symbol of the age we currently live in. Our culture is built upon a foundation of Christian thought, yet we live in a deeply profane world. It is easy to look at the Pitcher & Piano and mourn the loss of the sacred space, wishing we could scrub away the smell of the bar and return to the pure, sweet scent of the sanctuary.
But we have to remember that the vanilla scent is literally the smell of decay. It is a world falling apart.
Perhaps the lesson here isn't that we’ve lost something pure, but that we are looking for the sacred in the wrong place. We want our faith to be like that vanilla scent (pleasant, distant, and chemically stable). But that is the smell of a museum, not a living body. The Incarnation, the central event of our faith, was a descent into the sweat, the dirt, and the messy biology of the human experience. If we want the sacred to be alive again, we won't find it by sniffing the decaying wood of the past. We have to bring it down to the rubber mats, right in the middle of the mess.