A Homily for the Fifth Sunday in Ordinary Time
Readings: Isaiah 58:7-10  1 Corinthians 2:1-5  Matthew 5:13-16

When salt goes stale, we can taste it. Not so when we do the same.

We were made to see changes in the world around us. We are not so good at watching ourselves change. Which raises the Gospel question: How do we know when we have become stale salt, when we have lost the very flavor of the Gospel?

An obvious answer might be proposed: when we neglect the practice of our faith. Here is the problem with that solution. The fervent do not fall away from practice. By the time it fails, living faith has long since departed, just as death by natural causes trails the onset of disease. In both cases, if you want to prevent decline, you must remain vigilant.

Suppose that we are still saying our prayers, still showing up to worship. Examining our conscience, we can see no major departure from a life lived morally. We look healthy enough to others and to ourselves. How would we know that our living relationship with the Lord is dying, that we are falling away from life in the Spirit?

First, the answer. Then, a poem. Then, you are left to examine yourselves.

The answer. When we no longer see the eyes. 

Now, the little poem to help explain the answer. Geoffrey Chaucer’s “Rondel of Merciless Beauty.”

Your two great eyes will slay me suddenly;
Their beauty shakes me who was once serene;
Straight through my heart the wound is quick and keen.

Only your word will heal the injury
To my hurt heart, while yet the wound is clean –
Your two great eyes will slay me suddenly;
Their beauty shakes me who was once serene.

Upon my word, I tell you faithfully
Through life and after death you are my queen;
For with my death the whole truth shall be seen.
Your two great eyes will slay me suddenly;
Their beauty shakes me who was once serene;
Straight through my heart the wound is quick and keen.

In the life of faith, you have begun to fall when you no longer see the eyes of God, an utterly unique sort of gaze. 

All religious experience begins with the awareness that another is looking at us, gazing upon us, awaiting our response. And that is also where the experience we call religious ends, when the gaze departs.

We use the same word, “faith,” to speak of two distinct, though intertwined, realities. Faith is both a set of beliefs, what we believe, and the fundamental experience that prompts those statements, why we believe. 

We inherit the content of our faith, at least in its broad outlines. It is handed on to us by others. But no one can inherit the experience of faith. It must be given to us by God. God must step into our lives. Reveal himself to us. 

And what is the experience of faith? How might we characterize it to others who have not known it?

Your two great eyes will slay me suddenly;
Their beauty shakes me who was once serene;
Straight through my heart the wound is quick and keen.

Faith begins with the perception of another, someone who is not us, who is not of our world. We do not see this other, not in the way we see other people in the world. No, we perceive that we are being seen. We sense a gaze. Not always, but at times.

Your faith, if it has ever been more than a list of things you believe on the word of others, began with the awareness that you were being looked upon by “unworldly” eyes. You sensed the presence of another, someone who did not appear in your world but who, nonetheless, looked upon you.

That is how your life of faith began. 

Conversely, your faith is dying, you are becoming stale salt, when you no longer experience those eyes. 

Where did they go? How did you lose them? Why have they departed? When did you choose something less than those eyes? Without the gift of grace, this can happen to any of us, even to those who make religion their way of life.

If the experience we call faith is the awareness of God’s eyes, what if you cannot remember when you last saw them, when you were last seen by them? What must you do?

All you can do is to beg the Lord to look upon you again. 

Of course, his gaze never departs from us. Those unworldly eyes came with the gift of creation. But the gift of his grace is our awareness that he is gazing upon us. That came with our redemption. 

Christ redeemed us “once for all.” Everything God does is singularly significant, never needing to be repeated. But we must constantly renew ourselves simply to be ourselves. Unlike God, we do not fully possess ourselves, not on this side of the grave. We begin and cease and then again begin. So what begins as “once for all” in the Lord comes to mean for us: The savior saved, saves and will save. 

The eyes never shut, never depart, though we can shut ourselves off from them, wander away from the gaze. 

Your two great eyes will slay me suddenly;
Their beauty shakes me who was once serene;
Straight through my heart the wound is quick and keen.

Here again is the opening question. Is your faith stale salt? How long has it been since you have seen those eyes, since you were unmistakably aware that someone was looking at you? 

The Rev. Terrance W. Klein is a priest of the Diocese of Dodge City and author of Vanity Faith.