Bored with the Miracle

Salt, Light, and the Slow Starvation of the Modern Soul

Below is a reflection on the Gospel reading for Sunday, February 8th, in the Roman Catholic tradition: Matthew 5:13–16

---

… “You are the salt of the earth. But if salt loses its taste, with what can it be seasoned? It is no longer good for anything but to be thrown out and trampled underfoot. You are the light of the world. A city set on a mountain cannot be hidden. Nor do they light a lamp and then put it under a bushel basket; it is set on a lampstand, where it gives light to all in the house. Just so, your light must shine before others, that they may see your good deeds and glorify your heavenly Father.” —Jesus Christ

---

The world is before us as a banquet-table in candlelight, full of bread and wine, but we are wandering its aisles half-starved. We see the abundance. We smell it even. But there is still some invisible pane between us and the feast, and our deadened senses are knocking futilely at it. We eat all and savor little. The greater tragedy is not the pain but the apathy, the gradual stagnation of boredom with the miracle itself. It is not rebellion but weariness: that a creation blazing with God should seem to us but half-interesting.

We fail because of insulation. We have enclosed life in explanations till mystery can no longer touch us. We are bored. Bored with revelation. Growing weary of the slow, patient love that wears down stone. This is the most subtle triumph of Hell: to grow bored with God. Not rebellion but weariness, the silent shrug before eternity.

So we live among replicas. A voice without silence behind it. A touch deprived of communion. Suffering and pleasure reduced to information, digested and lost in the same movement. We have sanded the sharp edges from the world until nothing cuts deeply enough to awaken us. We consume experience like social media, informed and empty at the same time. The soul, the ache within us, is not starved but anesthetized, numbed by trivial excess. We aren’t chained rebels. We are sleepwalkers in Eden, outcasts with the keys to our own cells in our pockets.

We haven’t rejected Him. We’ve just lost the only door to home. He walked this earth, and the air trembled under the weight of His presence. Dust clung to His feet. We are walking the same streets now, but we are only registering pavement, deadlines, notifications, the next distraction.

Into this civil, easy famine His words come softly, as a bell heard in evening fields:

You are the salt.

A grain of earth. A small harshness against blandness. Salt is there to lose itself. It melts into the meat until there is nothing left but flavor. To be pure and separate is its curse, white and perfect in its jar, of no use to the hungry. So it is with those He calls. Faith is not a decoration but a substance, rubbed into the sores of the world, spent against its decay. You are the grit that holds all in place so that nothing slides into a polite and silent rot. You are not meant to be admired. You are to be tasted, and then forgotten.

Everything becomes slightly wrong without these hidden, dissolving lines. Love softens into sentiment. Justice is performance. Peace becomes sedation. The world doesn’t require more acute arguments. It requires the type of Presence that changes the mood of a room, makes lying more difficult, makes silence throb with truth.

And still He says:

You are the light.

Not a celebratory blaze. Not an interrogating beam. But the little lamp in a window at three in the morning. A city on a hill cannot feign darkness. It is made, unwillingly, a landmark to the lost. And light is ruthless in its truthfulness. It doesn’t make the cliff, it uncovers it. It reveals the face of the beloved and the face of the betrayer with equal clarity. God is already bleeding through the cracks of this broken world. Our task is not to bring Him, but to see where He is already breaking through, to point to the damp spot in the wall and say, “look, something is pushing through here.”

Holiness, then, is a stubborn, unpaid attention. It is gazing at the destroyed man until you notice the ruins of a sacred city behind him. It’s looking at a spreadsheet long enough to glimpse the fields and families lurking behind the numbers. It’s hearing a child tell an endless tale until the parable hidden in it comes out. Pretense wearies around such people. Truth slips out nearly against your will. Silence becomes complete instead of vacuous. And you experience once more the dreadful, glorious burden of your own life, its outcome and its possibility. In their gaze you become real, and the reality nearly undoes you.

This is the unbearable strategy of Heaven: God doesn’t break the glass walls of our prison. He sends in another prisoner who remembers the sun. Who touches bread as though it were a trace of grace left at the scene of the world’s crime, who hears confession as though it were the only honest speech remaining, who touches wounds as though he were tracing the outline of resurrection itself.

He does not insist that we create a new metropolis. He requests that but a few windows should be kept open in the old, failing city. To burn not gloriously but dutifully, until the darkness around seems a momentary thing. To dissolve so completely that a world chewing absentmindedly through its own dryness suddenly stops, startled by forgotten flavor—the taste of a home betrayed yet never fully abandoned.

And perhaps through this quiet economy of loss, through salt spent and light besieged, the world may remember, in a moment sharp as grace, its original and dreadful calling: to become, from its hidden core to its furthest horizon, a creation saturated with God.

---

---