| VI. Choir | 14 March |
|---|---|
| Prince of salt (of tears) | Matilda |
All creation has emerged pure from the Hand of its Creator, and it reflects its Lord and God in His wisdom and beauty, power and omnipotence in a thousand ways; it is one song of God’s glory.
Matter, earthly nature, is also created by God. It is the great field, the foundation for the construction of plants and animals. And it is also said of man: “God took the dust of the earth and formed man from it, and breathed into him the breath of life.” Even if scholars want to prove that man is a product of evolution, his body is still made of matter and his soul, as the breath of life, is from God. God has stretched out His hand over everything and spoken His “Be!”, and nothing is so small and insignificant that God’s fatherly Eye has not looked upon it. Everything is under this divine protection: the worlds of the stars as well as the swarming of small ants, and over everything the Lord has placed His angels as stewards and executors of the Divine Order.
The choir of those angels known as “administrators,” is the Choir of Princes. And one such prince stands here today as an intercessor:
Saint Hazel,
the prince of the salt of creation. God shows him to us with a venerable countenance, as older people often have, and there is a great spaciousness and stillness in it. One is reminded of an ocean furrowed by the keels of ships, of a plowed field of a human life that has passed its test and truly become salt of the earth, as God wills it of us.
Saint Hazel holds a glass cube in his hand like a house in which the light of God refracts threefold and from which the rays break out on all four sides. This is to signify that grace, as a light from God the Father, breaks in as a reminder: “You are the salt of the earth…”; that in the same way, grace from the Son is given to us as the grace of loving repentance, of tears; and that finally, wisdom of the Spirit presents us with the salt in creation as an image of purification and cleansing, of protection against decay. And the radiance of this light from the glass cube in the hand of the angel means the flooding of grace upon all places and all times as order and purification, as preservation and cleansing, as power and distinction.
The gift and grace of tears is also included in the image of salt. Tears are natural to a child, but in an adult they can express weakness as well as joy, regret as well as sorrow or pain. But those tears of anger or of acting are the violation of good by evil, as we find it again and again; for tears are given to us by God as a natural relief from inner tension, but should never serve sin.
When our Lord suffered the agonizing hours of mortal fear on the Mount of Olives, His tears flowed down, and as He almost broke under the torment of fear, hundreds of drops of Blood from all over His Body mingled with His tears and sanctified the water through the Blood. When we add salt to holy water today, it is not just a symbol of cleansing and purification, protection and strengthening through the waters of grace. For the holy angels, this holy water with salt is a symbol of the Tears of the Mother of God, which She sheds before God, using Her intercessory power to beg for mercy for us.
Prayer: Holy Angel, Saint Hazel, keep our hearts and tongues pure, that we may think and speak purely and that our actions may not be rejected by God like salt without savour. Obtain for us the grace of tears of repentance and help us to find grace before God through the Tears of the Sorrowful Mother. Amen.