spring 2010

The Spiritual Conversion of St. Paul:
A Journey in a Flash of Light

by Steve McGehee

All introverts know that the way to faith is through a logical life-sequence or process: Faith is the end-result of the spiritual journey, the end-game, right? Well, not so fast. To those card-carrying extroverts out there, faith can also be freely given, sometimes in a flash of light. Sometimes, it simply happens, without warning, and the rest of life, after the fact, simply helps us understand what has gone before. To the extroverts, faith sometimes just comes upon us, and then we seem to spend the rest of our lives trying to understand what it all means.

Now if the extroverted notion of how faith is bestowed is true, then St. Paul turns out to be one heck of an extrovert. However, prior to his sudden and miraculous conversion, there was no hint of what was in store for him, particularly considering his early life. Prior to conversion, Paul was just another person in the vast patchwork of characters circulating in a radically Hellenized Middle-eastern culture. To begin with, he was a Roman citizen, who grew up in a fairly wealthy family; he was a tent-maker by trade; and he was brought up a Pharisee, practicing a strict Jewish faith that relied heavily on law and Torah. Paul was associated with members of the Sanhedrin, or high counsel, in Jerusalem, and through that association he was recruited to suppress the Christians after Stephen, the first Christian martyr, was stoned to death around 35 A.D.

In fact, if you turn to Acts 7:58, it is clear that Paul was actually present during the martyrdom of Stephen. There he was, in the crowd, caught up in the moment, perhaps even shouting curses at the top of his lungs. One can imagine the scene: A large crowd had gathered around Stephen, and angry words were being tossed to and fro. And then the first stone was thrown, and then another, and then another. What provoked such anger? Stephen hardly seemed to be someone who deserved such a reaction. Not long before the whole incident, he had been appointed by the Apostles to "serve tables" in Jerusalem. As such, he was the first official deacon, relegated to an administrative role of caregiver to a small but growing Christian community, while the spiritual heavy-lifting -- the preaching, the performance of miracles, the evangelizing -- remained with the Apostles.

But something had taken hold of Stephen that must have caught Paul's attention. Instead of carrying out the duties of caregiver, Stephen began to evangelize and perform miracles. He was not an Apostle, but he sure acted like one. He was caught up in the Holy Spirit; he was himself miraculously transformed into something that drew the ire of the Pharisees and the attention of the Sanhedrin. And there was something about him that so angered others that his death seemed a certainty. He was a dead man walking, and the Holy Spirit seemed loose in the world. Just days before, the Spirit of Pentecost had descended on the Apostles, and flames of fire had appeared on their heads. This Jesus, who had earlier stirred up the anger of the crowd and who was himself put to death as a consequence, was apparently not dead at all, but somehow alive in the world. The genie was out of the bottle, resurrection was real, and something needed to be done!

Enter Paul, the perfect everyman to put out this flame, to restore order. He took off at once for Damascus with every intent of flushing out the disciples, of ending once and for all what Jesus had unleashed on the world in his resurrection. And then a curious thing happened on the way to Damascus: Paul was blinded by the same light that had appeared to the disciples on Pentecost and that had changed Stephen from deacon to prophet. The one who was sent to snuff out the Spirit was himself transformed by it. At one moment he was a persecutor of the church; in the next he was leading the church out into the world, beyond Palestine and on to Rome. Paul clearly saw his own miraculous conversion on the road to Damascus as couched within the context of a bona fide resurrection appearance by Jesus himself. In his first letter to the Corinthians, he admitted, "Last of all, as to one untimely born, [Jesus] appeared also to me" (1 Cor 15:8). He was not one of Jesus' disciples, but in a flash of light he was suddenly one of them. One moment he was a persecutor of Christians; the next he was an Apostle.

The conversion of Paul occurred in a nanosecond, when faith was freely given, and out of that gift, a new life, full of the Spirit, was instantaneously formed. In a flash of light, Paul's real journey began in earnest, a journey he would use to make sense of that moment on the road to Damascus when everything changed. Around 47 A.D., he began what turned out to be three major missionary trips to bring Christianity to the pagan world. First, he headed to Asia Minor and the city Antioch. He then took a trip west to Philippi, in present-day southern Syria, where he established the church in Europe. Finally, he went to Ephesus in eastern Turkey. Around 59 A.D. Paul traveled to the heart of the Roman Empire, to Rome itself, and there he was imprisoned and ultimately beheaded in 67 A.D. during the reign of Nero, who ordered one of the first great persecutions of the Christians. In a strange twist of fate, the one who was present at the death of the first martyr, Stephen, was himself martyred. The hunter became hunted.

During these journeys, Paul wrote letters to the various mission churches he helped found, encouraging them but also, in the process, seeking to make sense of the power of his own conversion experience. And it was in contemplating the meaning of his own journey that he came to see that flash of light as an experience of the living God, alive and well in the eternal now of our lives. This process of intense reflection engendered in Paul a very real sense of God's grace in the life of all those who believe. The fact that he so thoroughly dedicated his life to the church is itself a miracle. Jesus was not physically with him as he walked the road to his own demise; Paul did not have the benefit of the guiding hand of the divine. But Jesus' presence was so close that it became a kind of prolepsis of faith for the Apostle. Newly converted, he was guided by something far enough away that its presence was nowhere to be seen but close enough that its Spirit guided his each and every move. Was this Jesus' second coming, or had he never left? Paul seemed to be acting out of some kind of reality that was squarely in between perception and experience. In the Spirit, Paul occupied a thin place.

Paul was a card-carrying spiritual extrovert, no doubt. A flash of light marked a miraculous moment of conversion, apparently ending a faith journey at the very place it began. And yet it took a lifetime of refection and, ultimately, a life of surrender to scratch the surface of the meaning of this miraculous moment. Paul's journey was his own, but it was equally ours as we continue to seek an understanding of what precisely he experienced. We might never know for sure, but its power will likely be part of our own spiritual journeys from here to eternity.

Turn on the light, and life begins anew. Such is the power of the Holy Spirit.

Thanks be to God.

Steve McGehee has been a member of All Saints' since 1991. He is currently a postulant for Holy Orders in the Diocese of Atlanta and is enrolled in his first year of a three-year MDiv. program at Virginia Theological Seminary in Alexandria, Virginia.

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