Sermons from St. Luke's Episcopal Church in Atlanta
The Feast of Pentecost
May 24, 2026 · 0 min · 8 segments
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Sermons from St. Luke's Episcopal Church in Atlanta
May 24, 2026 · 0 min · 8 segments
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In my house, when the first drops of rain begin to fall in any storm, without fail, my wife will cease whatever she is doing and walk out onto our front porch to watch it.
She could be working, she could be in the kitchen, she could be doing any manner of things.
She will walk out on the porch to watch that rain.
It's like a ritual for her.
It's almost an, a subconscious action, kind of a primeval compulsion.
[laughing]
She's drawn out by the sight and the sound of fresh rain, and by the smell.
Particularly the smell, I think.
We learned the word for that smell recently, that pleasant, earthy scent that fills the air when rain falls on dry soil.
That word is petrichor.
Petrichor.
It came home on a weekly vocabulary list from my daughter's sixth grade class a few months ago.
[laughing]
We were delighted to learn that there's a name for that smell that we all know.
Petrichor.
It's a cool word.
It comes from two Greek words, petra, meaning stone, and ichor, which means the fluid that runs through the veins of gods.
Not exactly blood, but the life force.
Divine blood o- on the rock, if you will.
That scent is generated by a number of things, but what we're mostly smelling when it happens is the reaction of water coming in contact with microorganisms in the soil, and that water causes those microorganisms to kind of burst back into life.
It's literally the scent of things being brought back to life.
And it turns out that petrichor is one of the few scents that our human, paltry olfactory senses are really good at smelling.
We're extraordinarily sensitive to it.
The internet says that we are vastly more sensitive to this smell than sharks are to blood in the ocean.
In my house, when the first drops of rain begin to fall in any storm, without fail, my wife will cease whatever she is doing and walk out onto our front porch to watch it.
She could be working, she could be in the kitchen, she could be doing any manner of things.
She will walk out on the porch to watch that rain.
It's like a ritual for her.
It's almost an, a subconscious action, kind of a primeval compulsion.
[laughing]
She's drawn out by the sight and the sound of fresh rain, and by the smell.
Particularly the smell, I think.
We learned the word for that smell recently, that pleasant, earthy scent that fills the air when rain falls on dry soil.
That word is petrichor.
Petrichor.
It came home on a weekly vocabulary list from my daughter's sixth grade class a few months ago.
[laughing]
We were delighted to learn that there's a name for that smell that we all know.
Petrichor.
It's a cool word.
It comes from two Greek words, petra, meaning stone, and ichor, which means the fluid that runs through the veins of gods.
Not exactly blood, but the life force.
Divine blood o- on the rock, if you will.
That scent is generated by a number of things, but what we're mostly smelling when it happens is the reaction of water coming in contact with microorganisms in the soil, and that water causes those microorganisms to kind of burst back into life.
It's literally the scent of things being brought back to life.
And it turns out that petrichor is one of the few scents that our human, paltry olfactory senses are really good at smelling.
We're extraordinarily sensitive to it.
The internet says that we are vastly more sensitive to this smell than sharks are to blood in the ocean.
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