Even outside the parables Jesus spoke often in riddles or metaphors. To cite three:
‘You are the light of this world.’
‘I am sending you out like sheep among wolves.’
‘Be you the salt of the earth.’
The last is what we’d like to talk about here.
My impression is that we tend to take that metaphor matter-of-factly, as when we say ‘taking it with a grain of salt’ the idiom, the exact meaning of which we actually haven’t double-checked.
What did Jesus mean?
Not to give two of our fellow MetroPost columnists a run for their flock, he-he.
Salt is so plain and common, we don’t really give it much thought. One can even say we don’t give it any thought.
The doctors tell us to go easy on salt. Watch our health.
But Jesus said…
How reconcile these?
If we haven’t misread, the great oceans of the planet took billions of years to produce salt.
If we aren’t jumping to conclusions, we say, therefore, salt is a wonder, a marvel, a miracle of creation!
Throughout history, particularly recent history, our species has polluted the planet — even it seems the sea though (pardon if we are talking through our ecologically-illiterate hat) assume that the great sea will turn everything we dump into it to gold, pardon another metaphor.
If we aren’t being too poetic, we write: blood is the circuiting inner sea within us that, with its salt, cleanses our bodies. That’s not even original.
The salt in the oceans does to the oceans what the salt in our blood does to our bodies — cleanses, makes clean.
Granted that the great flaw in our drift so far is that we are talking of something that is no longer there. In the same manner that according to Rachel Carson in the 50s, spring has gone silent. Earth has been wasted by — what, who else?
That’s to say, the salt we are talking about is gone, and is now nothing much more than a platonic idea — something of that sort.
Well, definitely ‘industrialized salt’ (the one served in airplanes and hotels) is not what we mean.
That salt is, like white sugar, pernicious.
What about iodized salt?
It’s what we now consume in gentle Dumaguete.
Well, we remember that it was former Senator and Health Secretary Dr. Juan Flavier some years back, who told us iodized salt is excellent, beneficial to our health.
Some people are not convinced it is, more than suggesting that not enough laboratory research has been done to corroborate or confirm Dr. Flavier’s endorsement.
These critics possess credibility, even authority, though googling on our part tilted the balance to iodized salt’s favor.
Nonetheless being loyal to books we inclined to giving their words weight. Besides, we keep in mind the, quote unquote, lesson of our time: ‘Information is not knowledge.’
But whether ‘iodized salt’ is really good or not is not the point. Simple logic tells us the idea is OK. Mindful of the fact that most people tend to be deprived of essential iodine, a wonderful idea was conceived: put iodine into the salt we consume. Thus, ‘iodized salt.’ Let’s leave the details of the process to the experts, the scientists.
But the salt which is treated with iodine — before the treatment — that’s our rub.
Some years back, we talked to someone from the Silliman University Marine Lab. We asked him about the salt we consume in Dumaguete (presumably also in neighboring towns). We were told that our salt, then coming from Bais, was excellent since it came from an ecologically still undamaged sea.
(We assumed that from the sea, the salt came to us thanks to wind and sun, not to fire or any other chemical process. And then harvested from the rocks, they slept in by human hands.)
Upon prodding, he added that an industrial factory cast some shadow on the future.
We can hear our ecologically well-informed reader muttering, ‘Tell me about it.’
But even in our small, gentle world, we seem to be resigned to our Zeitgeist. There is no stopping progress. So there’s no evading the price.
There’s no evading even the salt that in markets all over the world labels itself ‘sea salt’ when it’s not.
Not the one that Jesus used for metaphor.
________________________________________
Author’s email: [email protected]
