Can you imagine any food without a pinch of salt? In Indian cooking, even the sweet payasam cannot go without a pinch of salt. When Jesus said: “You are the salt of the earth. But if the salt loses its saltiness, how can it be made salty again? It is no longer good for anything, except to be thrown out and trampled underfoot” (Mathew 5:13) Jesus was not taking a cooking class but emphasising the importance of salt in comparison to communicating happiness.
Being Christian means not losing the taste of our Beliefs. Being Christian means adding meaning to the life of people who suffer. We can have the best of material comforts but if we do not have the ‘joy of life’ everything is vanity.
A wealthy man whose little son enjoyed the comforts of their lovely mansion took him to a very poor village to spend a day to give him a ‘taste’ of what poverty is. On returning, the father asked his son what he saw.
The boy said “I see, we eat packaged food and canned stuff, they grow their own vegetables and eat fresh, we have chandeliers for light and decoration but they sleep under the starlit skies, we have two high-breed dogs they have dogs all over the village barking at us strangers, we have a swimming pool, they have an ever-flowing river, we have computer games and there the children spring about and play around with each other, we hardly know anybody in the neighbourhood but those people seem to know everybody’s name in the village, we have no time to talk to each other but those parents spend so much of time with their children. I realised indeed how poor we are compared to them”.
The father hugged his little son as his heart struck a chord.
We can sometimes experience poverty amidst plenty. Our happiness can never subsist in material things. There are people who have possessions but are not happy and there are those who hardly have much, but are happy and content in life because they know the value of ‘salt of life’. The worst form of poverty is the feeling of being unloved and uncared for.