Dear Friends,
I have an… unusual… number of feelings about salt.
That may seem like a strange thing to say, but here are some stories. When I was 12 years old, I went on a trip to visit my godfather and his family. He was living in London and, despite this being my first time outside of the United States, in the two weeks I was away, I read the half dozen books I had dragged along with me and I needed something else to read. What I picked up was Mark Kurlansky’s “Salt,” a lengthy history of the important role that salt has played throughout history. I closed it, completing the 500 pages, just before climbing into a cab to fly home. Salt gave me a taste, so to speak, for strange and complex histories. These types of books remain among my favorite genres, but it started with salt.
Salt. That simple compound that makes food taste better and is used to preserve it, that was once used to pay soldiers because it was so valuable. Salt. There’s probably a pile of it in your kitchen that cost you no more than a few dollars, and yet that same salt is vital to our health, maintaining complex systems, helping our hearts to beat and our nerves to send messages. And then there is the way salt increases the density of water so that we float just a little closer to the heavens, bumping gently against the invisible firmament.
Now, as essential as salt is, I need a lot more of it than other people. I start my day by taking an entire gram of salt, which is about half the recommended about for an adult for an entire day. For me, though, it’s only about a fifth of what I’ll need. I add more electrolytes powder to my water, liberally salt my food, and snack on salt and vinegar chips endlessly, in hopes of maintaining something resembling normal blood pressure and an upright habitus.
So, when Jesus starts talking about salt, well, he’s got my attention.
Staying Salty
There’s a joke that floats around on the internet about how someone buys a package of salt that’s marketed as ancient, formed 250 million years ago in the sea – only to find that it’s marked with an expiration date the following year. Gosh darn it! 250 million years and it’s just our luck to have caught that salt at the end of its usefulness. That’s some terrible luck. And it raises some questions about this week’s Gospel.
“You are the salt of the earth; but if salt has lost its taste, how can its saltiness be restored?”
Have you ever actually put a spoonful of salt into a dish only to find it’s done nothing? Or licked the salt from your fingers after finishing some chips and tasted just the strange flat, almost nothingness of your own skin? As the joke about the ancient yet expiring salt suggests, salt doesn’t lose its saltiness, so what is Jesus saying here? For salt to lose its saltiness is for it to become something else entirely. In other words, it’s a fundamental matter of identity.
If a crystal of salt isn’t salty, it might as well be a mustard seed. It may as well be a clay jar cradling leaven. It could simply be new wineskins overflowing with wine. There’s nothing wrong with any of those things. In fact, we have stories about all of them, parables and miracles and lessons on how to be. But salt. This one line about salt is about being who we are.
There’s a lot of terrible, regressive, dangerous writing and content in the world about how hard it is to be Christian. I came of age amidst the fictions about Christianity linked to Columbine, at the peak of “Jesus Freak” culture. I’m a little to young for “Meet You At The Pole” (which apparently still exists), but I’m precisely the kind of person who carried my Bible to my public middle school in its army fatigue-green case, who listened to contemporary Christian radio backed by groups like Focus on the Family. It was a messy combination. But I never had any delusion that being Christian was forbidden or dangerous.
That doesn’t make it easy.
Nothing we are called to do or be by the words of the Gospel is simple. And, if you’ve ever gathered sand at the beach, you know there are lots of things that look just like salt – tiny crystals that, no, aren’t salty. The difference between one of those Himalayan salt lamps and some other pink crystal? My geologist friends can surely be a lot more nuanced about this, but from the outside, the answer is that there isn’t much of a difference. But if you tasted them, if you came close, if you tried to put them to use, you would discover the difference. At their core, these things are not the same.
The Taste of Faith
“Taste and see” – this is what Psalm 34 tells us, and amidst the feasts and wedding banquets and the breaking of bread, the Bible offers us many tasty moments. And then there is salt, which does not give flavor, but elevates it, makes it better, deeper, and more nuanced. We are who we are without the salt, but the salt – oh, it is wonderful. And the salt, the depth of our identity, add it to our lives through intention.
With Lent around the corner, we have the opportunity to orient ourselves back towards intention, to set a place at the table for our faith. Between this week’s lectionary and its thoughts on salt and my most recent time with my circle telling the Parable of the Mustard Seed (and making jokes about sandwiches), food-based practices are close at hand.
Making pretzels is a particularly traditional Lent activity, one surrounded by history and myth and, wonderfully, topped with salt. It’s also an easy enough activity that even if you’re not someone who spends a lot of time in the kitchen (personally, I’ve been making a pot of congee during the entire time I’ve also been working on this letter), that you may find yourself focused on trying to make them “better,” tweaking the recipe, mastering the folding motions.
(Of course, if you are a fellow kitchen goblin, you may prefer some of the wonderful resources at Kendall Vanderslice’s Edible Theology project. She’s got everything for Lent, and then some.)
Maybe, to you, faith tastes like communion wine (or grape juice). Maybe it crackles like the wafer folding and dissolving on your tongue.
Maybe, to you, faith tastes like breaking bread. Or your grandmother’s spaghetti sauce or like fresh cut grass or ocean wind. Maybe it’s sharp and sour, like a lemon plucked from a glass of seltzer or off the rim of your favorite cocktail. Or maybe it’s just salt, its dry, astringent sting against cracked lips, how it gathers in corners of eyes, the crinkles and lines of laughter and sadness carved by tears.
Taste and see and, even more importantly, be what helps others taste and see. Stay salty because salt doesn’t ever lose its taste, but we all forget to salt our food sometimes.
Peace,
Bird