Thursday of the Seventh Week in Ordinary Time
“Salt is good, but if salt becomes insipid, what will restore its flavor? Keep salt with you and you will have peace with one another.” - Mark 9:50
Why do references to salt find their way into the words of Jesus in the gospels?
- All life on our planet requires water and salt, without which dehydration is inevitable. The ancients recognized salt as powerful magic for the preservation of life.
- The words “peace” and “war” have their beginnings in the Hebrew for bread and salt.
- Historians believe that most primitive warfare started over the control of salt supplies.
- Salt acts as a fertilizer and antiseptic.
- Salt kills weeds and improves soil.
- Although it stings, salt cleans out cuts and heals bruises.
- Today salt is the largest mineral consumed. Every day 6 billion people use it.
- Salt preserves our food and melts snow and ice.
Historically, salt and salty people have subversive overtones:
- All empires controlled salt sources. Rome was known as the Via Salarium.
- The great ancient fortress of Masada mattered because of the salt supply roads leading from Sodom to Syria. Jewish Zealots in control of Masada knew this.
- Gandhi’s first act of civil disobedience was his great symbolic trek to “make salt” at the Indian Ocean.
- In 1956 as cold war witch hunts were sweeping America, accused movie makers produced a direct challenge to McCarthy in a film entitled, “The Salt of the Earth.” The film championed the rights of zinc miners to strike in the face of social injustice.
We’ve all admired people who are “the salt of the earth.” Salty ones among us oftentimes sting, but like salt itself, they fertilize, cleanse, and sustain our Christian life. You don’t have to confront the British Empire or McCarthyism to join the ranks of the salty ones. A little bit of salt goes a long way.
A salty person who particularly stands out for me is Sallie Coaston. Sallie’s was one of the first black Catholic families that found their way to Cincinnati’s Madisonville neighborhood in the 1950s. She was told by the pastor that she should attend the “colored” church downtown. No, she said, she lived in this neighborhood and would bring her family to worship in Madisonville. Decades later Sallie became the director for evangelization for St. Anthony Parish in Madisonville. It became one of the best integrated Catholic parishes in the country.
None of us will change the whole world, but like salty Sally we can change our little piece of it.
—Timothy J. Cronin