Salty Dog

September 13, 2006 by djackson.

I live on an island.

Its official name is “Ward Island,” after a businessman who once owned it, visions of vacation resort sugar plumbs dancing in his head.  Nobody knows what the original inhabitants, the Karankawa indians, called it when they took up residence here a millennium ago.  They all died out shortly after white men came to this region.  They left behind only their bones and a rep for cannibalism. 

The point is that I live on an island, bounded on one side by Corpus Christi Bay and on another by the Cayo del Oso and that a lovely, quiet trail skirts one shoreline.  I have to share my island with a university, but that’s okay because, in addition to maintaining the trail, they have stationed signs along the way to give me insights into the local ecosystem.  One thing I learned, for instance, is that a monitoring station out in the Cayo checks the salinity of the seawater every half hour ’round the clock.  Salt, it seems, is very important to my island.  The coastal marsh is a wetlands, a sort of geological kidney which filters and purifies everything, and it runs on NaCl.  Halophytic plants (really, that’s a word - it means they love salt) thrive in the swamps and serve as lint traps.  Salt cedar trees suck up the stuff then secret it in toxic teardrops which kill off encroaching plants, a sort of natural no-compete clause.  So the university keeps tabs on the sea the same way you make sure you’ve filled the salt shaker before serving guests.

I know that Jesus, having voluntarily wiped his divine hard-drive, didn’t “know” anything about the South Texas coast.  The kenotic Ctrl+Alt+Delete of Philippians 2.7 means that he had to gain knowledge the same way that you and I can - by the use of his five senses, the synthesis of his brain-bound intellect, and tuning into the speech of his Father.  The One who spoke sodium and chloride into existence discovered salt on the end of his tongue, the taste buds of incarnate Godhood telling him about his own world.  Still, he hung around on the seashore a lot.  Shoot, he didn’t need a nifty paved path to take an oceanside stroll; he could wavewalk at will, getting up-close and personal with the flora and fauna.  And though he limited himself to the same avenues of learning as we have, our sin-spoiled intellects cannot conceive how he processed the data.

What I’m getting at is I don’t think Our Lord was pondering cord grass and yucca when he said, “You are the salt of the earth,” but I do think there’s a valid parallel.  The Holy Spirit constantly monitors us for salinity.  Can the halophytic greenery of the Kingdom thrive if soul-surf supplies its life blood?  Can the salt cedars of an alternate reality find in me sufficient resources to weep the tears that kill encroaching tares?  Am I helping to create a cleansing system that gently filters filth from sick souls? 

How salty are we?  How salty do we have to be.

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