January 25: Conversion of St. Paul

Acts 26:9-21; Psalm 67; Galatians 1:11-24; Matthew 10:16-22

This is one of my favorite feast days.  I relate to Paul on so many levels.  His passion, his desire to connect, his arrogance and insecurity - I know myself to contain all that.  I relate to Paul's willingness, or compulsion, to turn on a dime and follow this new call.  And while my conversion experience was not as dramatic as his, the consequences for my life were pretty drastic. 

In 2000 I left my job teaching political theory and women studies and entered an Episcopal convent.  I think of that sometimes as my time in Arabia, preparing me for mission.  I lost a lot of friends with that shift, not so much because they rejected me as because I withdrew with that move.  I couldn't hold together the old and the new for a long time.  Eventually I circled back to integrate those lives, but it took time. 

Paul isn't ashamed of his past.  He persecuted the group he is now trying to grow.  But he knows that his experience is a gift.  God grabbed him and turned him, and is using him.  He is exhibit A of the wisdom of God that can look like foolishness (1 Cor. 1:21).  He proclaims a Gospel that scandalized people then, and now.  Suffering?  Undergoing?  What kind of God is that?  He says that is the God who unites humanity and divinity, and shows us how to do the same.  

I try to follow that God.  I still fight with my reptilian brain, with my fear of suffering, but I believe the promise too.  I want to live full out, not holding back, pouring out all I have for the love of God and you.  I am still me, as a Paul was still Paul, but I am transformed by the love of Christ.  I pray that you know that love, that you find yourself dislocated and overwhelmed by that love, and that you get your bearings and share with others.  If this has happened to you already, I pray that it happen again.  Dislocation is a door to contemplation, as Parker Palmer says.  See!  Our God is with you.