Salt and Water

This morning I had a horrible, horrible nightmare in which I was reliving a particular sin, and woke up from it very suddenly with feelings of disgust and fear. I've had this problem before, generally leading to another downward spiral of depression as I get onto myself for thinking about something I was never supposed to think about again.

At the same time, I realized with a shock that I'd fallen back asleep after my alarm had gone off and had almost overslept my meeting that morning. I placed a quick call to the affected person and we got things worked out, and in the meantime I started to feel a little better about the nightmare, realizing that it was only a dream and that I would be able to stop myself if I were ever in that situation again while awake. However, these things have a habit of breaking out in clusters (often causing me to go days without proper sleep because I'm afraid to go to bed and have them again), and I began wondering how I could keep them from effecting me while I was awake, if I couldn't stop them in the first place.

At that moment, I had a mental vision of plunging my head into a bowl of salt water. That would cleanse my mind and allow me to keep going forward with my day. "This is how peasant superstitions get started," I laughed, and resolved to use the thing in a piece of writing somewhere rather than seriously do it myself. However, I kept getting gently poked by the idea until I decided to look it up and see if it was really a thing, or what the symbolism of it might be - and was shocked to see that salt water actually is a common 'magical' defense against nightmares. At first I panicked a bit, thinking, "Oh God, now the devil is trying to get me into magic." I admit I have proclivities toward superstition to start with (most people do, it's why we develop rituals for everything) and I was rather worried that they were getting directed in the wrong way. I prayed like mad and kept clicking links to see if I might be wrong.

When I saw that one site suggested using salted holy water, I calmed down and remembered how much 'magic' is derived from valid sacramentals that have become worshiped in and of themselves rather than seen as simply focuses for devotion, grace, and protection. I then started looking specifically for the uses of salt in holy water and found to my surprise that blessed salt and blessed salt in holy water are long-established means of driving away evil in all its forms. Despite a long Catholic education, somehow I had never actually learned much about salt besides the whole "salt of the earth" thing. We're accustomed in modern times to revile it for being unhealthy in quantity, but salt has been used since the ancients for preservation, and Catholics take that to symbolize preservation from sin. Obviously, a sacramental is not going to be all-efficacious against the devil, given that people sin in churches all the time, but really - besides direct Divine intervention, what is?

This post is running much longer than I meant to, so I'll try to wrap it up. What does it mean that the idea came to me by itself? Could mean almost anything. It's possible, I suppose, that I learned about blessed saltwater at one point and simply forgot until now, but I don't often do that kind of thing. It's also possible that I came up with the idea myself, based on the symbolism of salt and water, basic human symbols, but I'm not so sure that's what happened. I also highly doubt, now that I'm calmer, that the devil is going to hand me the key to a sacramental that will help me lessen his influence over me. I think it was from God. Now, am I going to literally go stick my head in a bowl of holy saltwater? Probably not, but I'm not ruling it out. I see it like the difference between baptism by immersion and baptism by pouring: they do the same thing, but one is more deeply symbolic and makes it easier to make the mental connection between form and matter.

Since a sacramental has no power in and of itself, it only does good when a person understands it as a physical link to God. Perhaps what was really needed here was just for me to realize the power of the prayers that are constantly gathered around me. I mean, like most Catholic girls, I have a collection of holy medals big enough to sink a battleship. In all honesty, I'm too chicken to go ask a priest to bless some salt for me, so I'll probably just go back to taking my rosary to bed...which really ought to be just as good.

Still, I wonder if we have any more holy water laying around the house.

--Veronica--