The Lord tells his disciples that they are the salt of the earth; they do in the world what salt does in food: it preserves it from corruption and makes it pleasant and tasty to the palate. But salt can be spoiled or corrupted. Then it is a hindrance. It is, next to sin, the saddest thing that can happen to a Christian: to be there to give light to many and to be darkness; to be a signpost on the way and to be lying on the ground; to be there to be the strength of many and to have nothing but weakness.
Lukewarmness is a sickness of the soul that affects the intelligence and the will, and leaves the Christian without apostolic strength and with a sad and impoverished interiority. This sickness begins with a weakened will, because of frequent faults and guilty lapses; then, the intelligence does not see Christ clearly on the horizon of his life: he remains distant because of so much carelessness in details of love. The interior life undergoes a profound change: it no longer has Jesus Christ as its center; the practices of piety become empty of content, soulless and without love. They are done out of routine or habit, not out of love.
In this state, one loses the promptness and joy with regard to God that are characteristic of a soul in love. A lukewarm Christian "is back", is a "tired soul" in the effort to improve; Christ is blurred in the horizon of his life. The soul sees the Lord, in any case, as a distant figure, inconcrete, with poorly defined features, perhaps indifferent; and it no longer makes the affirmations of generosity of other times: it is satisfied with less....
St. Thomas points out as characteristic of this state "a certain sadness, by which man becomes slow to perform spiritual acts because of the effort they entail." The norms of piety and devotion are more a burden poorly borne than a driving force that pushes and helps to overcome difficulties.
There are many Christians immersed in lukewarmness, there is a lot of salt that has been distorted. Let us think today about prayer if we walk with the firmness that Jesus asks of us, if we take care of prayer as the treasure that allows the interior life not to stop, if we nourish our love. Let us think whether, in the face of weaknesses and failures to correspond to grace, acts of contrition are promptly born that repair the breach that the enemy had opened.