The bit that catches my imagination in this week’s readings is from the Gospel: “You are the salt for the earth”.

The reason it struck me is initially practical. Each week I meet with a friend at a country pub, to share a beer and to chat about life and matters of faith. I was hungry and ordered fish and chips. They needed more salt. Without salt chips are bland and don’t even taste like what they actually are: potato.

Catholic Christians are called by Jesus to be ‘salt’ for the ‘earth’. In being this ‘salt’ Catholics are not adding to people’s lives something that is foreign or an optional extra. Instead it is Christ that enables us to be what we are created to be. Without a personal relationship with Jesus, humans are not even able to be human.

Too often people settle for an existence that is little more than survival or endurance. This is not life. God lives among us in Jesus so that we might have life, and have it in abundance. In this relationship of love we discover that we are no longer simply surviving or exixting, enduring or coping. Now we are able to LIVE.

If we are to be this Catholic “salt” for our world we must be visible and audible as Catholic in our families and workplaces, even in the pub and all aspects of our social and recreational life.

Catholicism is the faith that is made courageous in the Eucharist so that we can speak the truth about human life to humans. As the parishioners of the local Church of the Christchurch diocese we live every moment as the ‘salt’ of Christ for our communities.