You are the salt of the earth. // Matthew 5:13 My roommate has recently become mildly obsessed with Samin Nosrat’s book Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat and its corresponding Netflix series about the four essential elements of any good meal. She has since been peppering me (pun 100 percent intended) with more than I knew that I needed to know about salt. For instance: “Did you know,” she asks me one night as she’s preheating a skillet, “that when you add salt to meat before you cook it, it flavors it from within?” I did not know this, but as I take another bite of my own meal and determine it a bit too bland, I admit my cooking could have benefited from this fact. I allow myself a few moments to chew over this new knowledge (okay, okay, I’ll stop with the puns), and I find myself thinking of today’s Gospel.  Jesus tells us, “You are the salt of the earth” (Matthew 5:13). And our mission as His disciples, nourished by the grace of a rich sacramental life, is to flavor this world from within: within our homes, within our communities, within our parishes, within our careers, within a world that is often hostile to the Church. We need only look to the work of this day to determine where we are called to be seasoning. And when we show up wholeheartedly in those areas—with great faith, hope, and love—we can trust that the Lord is using us to bring the world to fullness of flavor in faith. Sister, take a few moments to consider the communities to which you belong, and pray about how the Lord might be asking you today to flavor them from within, through your witness to the Gospel.   

“Consecrate them in the truth. Your word is truth.” // John 17:17 I closed the classroom door and collapsed in tears at the table beside my desk, hiding my humiliation in hands smeared with dry-erase ink. In the year between earning my master’s degree in English and returning to school for my PhD, I felt called to teach fourth grade at a Catholic school. I had precisely zero background in elementary education but was willing to overlook that minor detail for the sake of forming disciples, and I trusted the credentialing process I’d undergo on the job to teach me everything I needed to know. What was that thing I’d heard about how God equips the called? Still, the learning curve was so steep that most days it felt like I was staring up at a jagged cliffside. I worked long days on campus and ended most nights in tears on my couch, and then one afternoon, a tough meeting left me feeling particularly vulnerable to accusations from the enemy: What a joke. You’re such a failure. You can’t do this. I went home that night and filled a playlist with music that sang of God’s goodness and of His love for me. I called it “TRUTH.”—its capital letters and period a declaration of war, a battle cry, a reminder of who and Whose I was. Over time, as I added to it and sang along in my apartment, my car, and my classroom before school started each day—and as it slowly became the soundtrack to a host of other bad days—I started to learn what it means to consecrate myself in God’s truth. The refrains of its songs became those of my own heart as I let Him tell me Who He is, and who I am as His beloved. Sister, we are not the lies the evil one whispers to us when we’re down and out. We are the Lord’s, Who loves and delights in us. We belong to Him. That is the truth. Wrap yourself up in that knowledge today; consecrate yourself in it.