Salt Shakers
The comedienne Catherine O’Hara died last week at the age of 71. To many of us, she will always be immortalized as the Home Alone mom who left her son behind on a family vacation as well as the quirky character actress in a handful of TV sketch-comedies and films. But that recognition is about where I thought it would end: a brief blip on the pop-culture radar that forever changes in our celebrity-obsessed world.
It seems like I might have been wrong about Ms. O’Hara’s lasting impact, however.
Two of Catherine’s quotes have been circulating on social media as of late, and both speak powerfully to how she saw herself and her vocation. To one reporter, when asked about her favorite role of the many she has undertaken in life, her response was unexpected: “Being a mother to my children.” And to another talk-show host when asked about acting, Catherine said something quite profound (which I paraphrase): “It’s our responsibility when given such an opportunity with the talents and gifts we’ve received to share them with others and bring them joy.”
For Ms. O’Hara, her vocation was one built on salt and light, and she realized she had an obligation to live from that space where God was glorified and others were recipients of love.
I always found “salt” quite a peculiar example for Jesus to use when commanding us to live our lives as servant-leaders. For the modern hearer, salt is either something to cut from our diet or an icy-sidewalk savior. We don’t think much of it otherwise.
Yet in antiquity, salt was a commodity that was more precious than silver and gold – it’s how our modern word “salary” came about. It preserved food; it was considered vital to health; and it lasted forever, pure and perfect. Unless …
Unless someone or something tampered with it.
Thus, when Jesus challenged his disciples to be salt, he was boldly telling us to live from that place where we preserve what has been handed onto us and then go and flavor the world with it. He wanted his life, his love, and his Cross to be ours as well, so that we become ones who transform the world around us in God and through Him.
Imagine living life in such a way that faith is more than simply a few prayers and attending Mass on Sunday (as good as these are). Rather, to echo the words of the Jesuit superior general Father Pedro Arupe, our Catholicism determines (or should determine) everything we do: why we get up in the morning; how we work; the ways we vacation; what we read and watch; and who and how we love. Jesus and His Good News should be the salt that preserves the world around us from decay; it should be the very thing that flavors life with taste.
It’s the same taste that the prophet Isaiah brings to bear in our first reading: The taste of genuine and lived faith should be the very thing that heals, saves, feeds, rescues the poor, and speaks out against injustice and on behalf of the ones who have no power and voice. Faith’s role is to be the very weapon that blows the lid off the keg of dynamite that the Church has sat-on and kept under wraps for far too long.
Could you imagine if we all lived our Catholicism from that place of realizing each of us – and all of us together as a parish community – are meant to be salt shakers – saving culture and seasoning it with the love and joy of Christ? Could you imagine how the Lord could use us right now to help build His Kingdom?
He is crying out from the Cross: be salt. And we can be, each in his or her own way. It doesn’t have to be earth-shaking, either – at least as we imagine that it should be. What if you and I committed to praying a decade of the Rosary each day for peace and reconciliation in our families and our communities? What if we donated $5 extra dollars to Outreach or the church each week? How about adopting a family and committing your Lent to make little sacrificial offerings for them? That is being salt for the world.
And when we are salt, we are light – a light so beautiful and lovely that it reflects Christ, for when all is said and done, it really is Him that shines through us. It is He who radiates to others, so that they, too, want to bask in that light to find healing and love and peace. Salt and light go hand-in-hand, and should never be hidden.
At the same time, however, know this: the more we try to shine His light and the more we try to spread the salt of His love, we will hit roadblocks. Satan doesn’t want this to be, and so he will attack: telling you and me that it’s not worth it and that we are doomed to living a life stuck in the muck of our sinfulness.
Don’t let the power of evil make your salt lose its taste. Fight back. Call on the name of Jesus. Run to His Mother. Go to Confession. Speak back to the lies that Satan wants to sow in your own hearts and minds. He can’t win. He’ll try, of course, but we know who has already won the Victory.
Therefore, Paul gives us the answer in his letter to the Corinthians: In humility, ask the Spirit of God to give you everything you need and to live your faith and life in such a way that God acts and speaks and moves in us. For in the end, it is never really about what we do; rather, it is about letting the Lord use our lives to glorify Him and to be the salt and light for His world. When we let His Divine and Perfect Will live within us, we will never be led astray.
We will live boldly and confidently as salt and light – HIS salt and His light for the Kingdom.
In watching the retrospectives on Catherine O’Hara’s life and body of work these past days, I was captivated by something in the actress that I guess I never paid too much attention to before. Watch her. She’s genuinely joyful. The Spirit was alive in her, and it wasn’t phony.
In saying that, I believe it comes back to the very things she indicated were the source of her life’s journey: her lived vocation as mother and her understanding that everything she had been given was a gift to be used to glorify God and bring joy to others.
Living our faith and our vocation fully – whatever that may be – is the very salt and light needed in the world today. Especially now.
Who knew that the Mom from Home Alone would be the one to make that lesson of Christ’s so very clear?