"Have Salt In Yourselves"

my jumbled holiday season

“For every one will be salted with fire. Salt is good; but if the salt has lost its saltness, how will you season it? Have salt in yourselves, and be at peace with one another.” (Mark, 9:50)

It was a weird Christmas. I spent the holiday alternating between reading the Bible (specifically the gospels), which I can find strange and consternating, and watching YTube videos on the never-ending theme of how awful “modern women” are (some of these are by modern women) and how, because of them, “dating culture” has been ruined. Which are definitely strange and consternating.

Let me back up for a minute. Christmas is usually a holiday with a lot of meaning for me; I enjoy it as a time of giving and good will, a time also for whimsical acknowledgment of miracles, especially of the Hollywood variety. This may be surprising, but Jesus is also meaningful to me as an embodiment of the divine, an emissary of an all-powerful and angry God who arrives on earth in the most helpless imaginable form: a baby during a time when babies are being killed by a paranoid king. A divine being who associates with sinners and whores, who is killed with common criminals, who is willing to join with humanity through an extreme human experience of anguish, degradation and death. Whether you believe or not, it’s a powerful and perverse story with a mutilated corpse as its icon—which we celebrate with a jolly tree and a children’s story of a guy in a red suit whose name is an anagram for the Adversary!