Reflections

It's trying to go up but it's having a hard time fighting the current ~ Marie-Ève Muller, Quebec Marine Mammal Emergency Yesterday a humpback whale died off the shores of Montreal from, I suspect, spending too much time in fresh water. This struck a chord in me, perhaps because I saw it as symbolic of the solitude, isolation and lostness in our world, a world sorely lacking in salt. I happened to be researching the word "salt". It started by looking into the meaning of the word Salem (root of the word Jerusalem), wondering if, because it started with sal , it was derived from the word for  salt,  and had the same root as the word "salvation".   As a preservative, a spice, a cleansing agent, salt was highly valued for its life-preserving, healing as well seasoning properties. It was traded between Italy and Rome, and offered with sacrifices to priests and kings. Indeed, in the Torah, sacrifices offered with salt were referred to as "covenants of...

~ And after the earthquake a fire; but the  Lord  was not in the fire: and after the fire a still small voice. I'm not a Christian but I have struggled my whole life to understand the meaning of "sacrifice", the mystery of the cross, and the human obsession with offering blood (goats, lamb, body parts or whole persons) to atone for our human condition. Raised by hard-working parents who loved us well but, like many of their generation, reminded us daily that they bore the cost of our privilege and good fortune, I rejected and was unwilling to pass that burden on to my own children.  So in my twenties, I completed a Master's thesis entitled "Le Sacrifice et la Générosité; Réflexion sur Autrui" that skewered the notion of sacrifice in favour of generosity as an act of giving from the feeling of abundance rather than from the pinch of obligation. If this was not love for another, I thought, at least it was not a need for personal atonement. Still I ...