Salt and Pepper

Call me strange, but when I see salt and pepper I think of Sts. Peter and Paul. Stranger still, I haven't quite made up my mind who is the salt and who is the pepper. Perhaps I just can't separate the two - whether on popcorn, baked potatoes, cucumbers, you name it... Sure, I can tell the difference, but I just got to have them together. Such it is with today's saints.

I'm in good company too. Mother Church has us celebrating them on the same day: the tentmaking Pharisee and the rash fisherman. Of course, we celebrate the Pharisees conversion and fisherman's elevation to keeper of the Keys... but the feast days proper to them as Saints - is today, together.

Peter did not become a saint, because he was the first pope. Paul did not become a saint, because he was a missionary. There are many a missionary (ahem) and many a pope (unfortunately) that were never saintly. However, these men carried the early Church on their backs - from the Council of Jerusalem after which Peter went to the Jews and Paul was sent to the Gentiles (thus essentially embracing humanity) to their shared imprisonment in Rome under the persecution of Nero - these men followed Christ.

It is that simple. Perhaps no two souls in the history of the Church ever reflected a more thorough and dynamic embrace of Christ. Jew and Gentile, Tarsus and Galilee, Antioch and Rome, choleric and sanguine, constant and wavering, intellectual and believing, authority and evangelization, nature and grace, salt and pepper.

No matter who we are, where we are from, or where we find ourselves today - Peter and Paul stand out for us as testimony of the ability to follow Christ, to work together, and spread the Kingdom!