Feeding the Fire

This week I have been thinking about signs and symbols, and three stand out: Salt, Millstones, and Fire.

I have a pretty good sense of what salt does. It accents the essence of food, builds up the taste, and makes the flavor more robust. Some people bathe in salt water for its medicinal powers. It makes a pretty healthy throat gargle too, and it can be mixed with water to clean a surface wound.

From what I have read about millstones, they were pretty handy for grinding wheat and corn, but they are really, really heavy. A few years ago, a 17^th century millstone was found in a creek in Nova Scotia. It was marked with what appeared to be a roughly cut cross. Finding the millstone lead historians to dig further into its origin, but nothing I read was conclusive—just that where millstones are, people must have been.

The third symbol is fire. For most Christians, fire is a symbol of the Holy Spirit, for purity, and for light.

These are all positive metaphors and symbols about salt, millstones and fire.

But each has a negative side. Salt does not really taste very good all by itself. It is a lifeless crystal. It symbolizes something cold, something barren. Who could forget Lot’s wife who turned to look back when angels told her not to.

Millstones are so heavy that, as Jesus put it, if you cause another person to sin, you would be better off to have one placed around your neck and be thrown into the sea. The stone will pull you down. You won’t resurface.

Two symbols of death—salt and millstone.

Fire, too, is destructive. When I think of fire, I think of hell, torture, and ruin.

Symbols and signs. How important these are to language and idea.

Yesterday, a football team from a school for students who are deaf came to my school to play a game. It was interesting to me to see this team communicate through signs. The players looked to the sideline after every down. Coaches flashed hand signals to talk to the quarterback. He, in turn, used hand signals to let players know when to snap the ball, and what to do.

It made me wonder about Jesus’ message to his disciples about tearing your eye out. It is all well and good to lose an eye if you have two good ears, but when you rely as much on your eyesight as these boys must in order to play football, …, well, you can see what I mean.

One of the most amazing things about watching that game was the contrast between the two sidelines. A good play by our side was followed by boisterous, jubilant cheers. When a similar play was made by the opposing team, you hardly heard a sound. Instead, players slapped their hands on their pads and clapped. They did not cheer. Those for whom they wished to share their jubilance could not hear.

For two hours, on a high school gridiron, the world seemed different. Half the people present could not hear what the other half was saying.

Maybe the lesson we are supposed to hear today is the one Meister Eckhart had in mind when he thought: The ears I use to hear God, are the same as those God uses to hear me. The eye with which I see God is the eye with which God sees me.

What has any of this got to do with salt, millstones and fire?

I struggled all week with the sentence in today’s Gospel that reads, “For everyone will be salted with fire.” My scholarly exegesis came up rather fruitless. It was the football game that taught me that language can be a stumbling block.

Many of the New Testament scholars I read suggested that the passage is warning us about the eternal punishment that awaits those who lead others astray.

Writing for The CHRISTIAN CENTURY, Loyola professor Stephen Fowl said, “If you are reading this column hoping to get some insight into Mark 9:49-50, you can stop now. These verses are intensely obscure; the commentaries offer little help; neither I nor anyone I know has received a special revelation explaining the text. Let us simply agree to move on to other matters.”

So it was that I found myself sitting in front of my laptop on Saturday night, blurry-eyed and puzzled, when the idea came to me that the stumbling block about this passage is really a matter of the language being used, and when language fails, symbols take over.

I believe that Mark wants us to know that the way of the cross means adding more zest to our lives.

“For everyone will be salted with fire” is how Jesus put it.

Salt: a mineral. Sodium Chloride. A crystal. Edible for humans, but toxic to most small plants. Salt flavors, heals and preserves. But without something to use it with, it is sterile. Think about the Dead Sea. Hardly any living thing can survive in this place, yet for centuries people have visited, dipped themselves into the water, and felt healed.

Salt can be deadly. Salt can be healthy.

Fire—that is what our tongue is. The words we use can be positive or negative. As we have seen these past two weeks, many have used words in very negative ways. They were used to call the president of the United States liar. They were used on a professional tennis court by a pro athlete to berate officials. They were used by a music super star to embarrass the recipient of a major award. Such misuse of words is rude; it is base; and more importantly, it is hurtful.

Salt can be used for good or be a symbol for what is bad.

As for being salted with fire, Jesus seems to be calling us to a higher self than the one we have chosen. He knows that we can be extraordinary, to live with passion and commit to something bigger than ourselves.

One of the promises we live by is that God will never ask us to do something without giving us the power to do it, but it is up to us to offer ourselves, everything about us—sins, passions, mistakes, hopes, selfishness, love—all of these to God, in faith, and, more importantly, with a demand that God take us and do something good with us!

To be salted with fire is to accept the fire that seasons us and makes us more worthy to season and support others.

The fire used is the fire that burns from the wood of the cross. The flames say, “Let go and be purified. Let go of ego and become seasoning for others. Let go of willfulness and begin to serve. Let go of greed and be generous instead. Let go and be broken by and for the sake of one thing—Love.”

Love makes us free. Love shapes each of us into a vessel that God can use to preserve that special salt—salt to heal this broken world. A poem by the late Bishop John Coburn contains the phrase:

“The wood/ of the Cross/ is the best/ for feeding/ the fire/ of love.”

When the wood is consumed, all that is left is the love—the love that we have for God, the love we have for God’s Son, and, through him, the love we have for each other.