Reflection for the Feast of the Conversion of St. Paul St. Andrew's Episcopal Church, Nags Head, NC Thomas E Wilson, Guest Celebrant January 25, 2023
Paul's Morning In the World
Today is the Feast of the Conversion of St.Paul. This is the day that the Church, one month of the year after it honors the physical birth of Jesus, it honors the Spiritual Birth of Paul. It is also an important day for me as well, since it is the 38th anniversary of my Ordination to the Priesthood in Blacksburg, Virginia. I was 38 years old at the time and I look at it now as the day in the middle of my life I found myself, the who I was supposed to be.
Paul, like Jesus, is physically born as a good Jew, there was a difference is that Jesus is born to create a new History, while Paul is born as a prisoner of his history. Paul was born and raised a Pharisee, a word that means “one set apart”. During the centuries of Hellenization, the influence of the Greek thought and culture spread after the conquest by Alexander the Great and after he died his empire was divided into three parts by his generals: Cassander took Greece, Ptolemy in Egypt and Seleucus in Babylon stretching from the Aegean Sea to Afghanistan. Both the Ptolemy line and the Seleucus line fought over control of Israel. Finally the Romans conquered them all. During all that time there were people who said, “No, we will not allow those other people to dictate to us what we will eat, wear, or think. We will hold on to being a separate people before a separate God. These were the Pharisees, Paul was proud to be a Pharisee. It was his history and he embraced it with a patriotic zeal tracking down enemies in the Jewish community who would alter that separate, “Holy” identity. He was a prisoner of his history. His meeting with the Risen Lord on the road to Damascus, is the collapsing of his History into a new way of living
Derek Walcott, a Caribbean, West Indian, Poet, said in his 1992 Nobel Prize acceptance speech: "For every poet it is always morning in the world. History a forgotten, insomniac night; History and elemental awe are always our early beginning, because the fate of poetry is to fall in love with the world, in spite of History."
Paul, enters into poetry, if you have any doubt read again Paul poem to Love in 1st Corinthians 13, falls in love with all the world, in spite of History. He leaves behind being a follower of defensive fear to become a proponent of love through the Christ of the present and future. He is born into a whole new way of seeing the world and in seeing himself, finding out who he really is. Again we return to Derek Walcott:
The time will come
when, with
elation
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in
your own mirror
and each will smile at the other's welcome,
and
say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your
self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself,
to the stranger who has loved you
all your life, whom you
ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the
love letters from the bookshelf,
the photographs, the
desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit.
Feast on your life.
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