Exhaling

Gabrielle’s comments on the seventh sonnet summarized so succinctly (I can’t resist an alliteration), that I’m using them as a springboard for something else I’ve been thinking about lately. She said (in case you haven’t explored the combox):

H, I looked it up too, and it was what I thought (a censor, for holding the blessed incense), but I read also that it is from the Greek “thyos”, meaning burnt sacrifice. The “thyos” sometimes needs a “thurible”; the burnt offering sometimes needs a vessel. To be a “living thurible” – hasn’t kt captured the essence of our whole spiritual journey, our “sojourn” on earth, with two words? We can be not only the living containers of the holy incense whose perfume rises to the Lord, but the actual burnt offering itself; living holocausts, living sacrifices.
St. Faustina often called herself a holocaust to the Lord, and she also said, “The bride must resemble the Bridegroom”, who was the holy and perfect Sacrifice. Living thuribles. What else could one become, if one follows “the blood-paved path He trod”?

This reminded me (in an indirect way) of a verse in Mark 9:
“For everyone shall be salted with fire, and every victim shall be salted…Have salt in yourselves.”

Yes, we are the burnt offering, the holocaust; fill this victim, this sacrifice, with fire.
Salt is purifying and preserving, signifying permanence and cleansing. We are salt – the salt of the earth – purifying and preserving. Salt is good, but if it loses its savor there is nothing that can take its place…
And we shall be “salted” (purified, preserved) with fire – the fire of the Spirit, the fire that consumes and transforms us, that makes our sacrifices pure and worthy offerings.
In the Spirit, we become an unbloody sacrifice, hidden in Him.

This “salting with fire” seems to lead to another implication – that we ourselves are “seasoned” and made clean by this action of the Spirit.

Ok, another poem is pertinent here -

Silversmith
“Cloud and darkness are His raiment…A fire prepares His path.”
Psalm 97

In the turbid dark where unseen sinnings steep
we seek the keys that make us free and whole,
but find a searing sword that pierces deep,
to vivisect the spirit from the soul.
The love He brings to free us must first burn;
to offer holocaust there must be fire.
He is puring flame and we in turn
must immolate our selves upon the pyre.
By cerement the conflagration’s fueled,
what light exposes, heat will cauterize.
Then healed, branded, by the King bejeweled,
freed, enslaved, like revenants we rise.

For He sits as a silversmith, refining,
vigilant till expurgation’s done;
burning off the dross till unalloyed souls, shining,
reflect the perfect image of His Son.