No! Wait! Stop! It's not a copycat thread! It only looks like one! Honest! Read the damned thing before you push that DELETE key!

Since tomorrow is Easter Sunday, will you be attending services at the church of your choice? If so, does your church use incense as part of its ceremonies? Will you be censed? (Yeah, I know I said "censered" in the thread title, but it's not really a verb. It's a noun. "Cense" is the verb. I cheated. So shoot me, okay?)

I've only been to one service in any church that uses incense. It was the funeral of an aunt who had converted to Catholicism. The rest of my extended family consists of a handful of Baptists and a lot of heathens like me. None of us had ever been to anything Catholic before and we'd never seen priests swinging brass balls full of sweet smelling smoke before, much less all those people counting beads and mumbling in some foreign language. It was a trip.

Now, I knew incense from my hippy days, but I never knew before then that it was important in church ceremonies. I always thought it was just to cover up the smell of pot and/or people who hadn't bathed in a while. Then I read Tom Robbins' Jitterbug Perfume and found out they'd been using incense in churches since God was a little bitty baby! Yeah, it was still used mainly to cover up the smell of people who hadn't bathed in a while (Like years, maybe?), but those people were praying, not getting zonked and listening to Pink Floyd.

So to return to the original question, are you going to church tomorrow? Will you get censed? Have you had a bath recently? Will the smell of the incense clash with your perfume or after-shave?

Okay, I'll go first. No! I'll stay home and sit in my gazebo at my pond and watch the irises, water lillies and pickerel weeds bloom while the koi swim around looking useless and pretty. If Jesus wants to come join me, he's welcome, but his place is a little too crowded for my taste and I gave up incense a long time ago.