Daily Signet

In the work world, when we eliminate an employee, we call it “firing them.” Normally, such a “firing” seems to result in a bankruptcy of esteem and hope, an unsettling sense of what else can go wrong and raises the question of where to go from here. But, I remember one company celebration, at which I met a former employee who had been fired in one of the company’s downsizings. I told him I was so sorry he had been let go. He responded by saying, “It was the best thing that could have happened to me. I didn’t like who I was becoming and I didn’t have the guts to do anything about it.” This guy was truly “fired.”

A firing can reveal a mercurial spirit—known in alchemy as the prima materia. Sometimes this spirit is represented by a salamander as the surviving element that emerges from the fire. Alchemists considered this element as a substratum that could transform baser metals into gold; it was the much sought-after philosopher’s stone.

I hope everyone in Christuman is fired—that we may be unhinged from our sources of comfort and be upended into seeing the salamander in the fire. I hope we get a swift metaphorical whack up the side of the head so that we see stars—that line of stars that runs along the spine and drops down into the craters of the mind. I hope we discover that we are priests to a soul that is bigger than each name and occupation and fears and American values and successes and failures. That somewhere in each of us, we are seamed with stars that can be revealed in fire by fire. The gift of God, of the imago Dei, of the imagining within you, is a gift of fire.                                      

Benjamin Martin