Consider this- Paul is a persecutor of what he does not know or understand. What seems strange, foreign and perhaps too "childish" or "silly" is what must be erased. Paul is educated and superior and is not in need of something fanatical.
Once Paul encounters Christ himself, he becomes like a child. First, his sight is taken away. This is a point which is also a help to us who never see Christ but only hear him.
He is so incapacitated that he must follow along and be ordered and lead by the hand. He is essentially made to be humble.
Once Paul is given back, in a sense, his powers (at least of sight) he faces a choice- God has made himself known, and Paul has realized his own human frailty- but what will it mean for his life?
Paul chooses obedience, just as Our Lady and as Christ himself. He goes to the Apostles, the same who know him as a killer, and seeks forgiveness and acceptance.
This is so contrary to what our culture teaches humanity!
We are expected to never be zealous enough to attack something we don't like in the first place- leave that to our leaders.
Next, if we are zealous, it is mocked because the "truth" is that we are being childish, and not adult. This one point behooves me to disparage it because I cannot understand when it was decided by the whole of mankind that it is "childish" to care, and "adult" to not!
Does that not reek of sloth, failure, ruin, selfishness and worst of all, fear?! It smells pretty bad to me. Allow me momentarily to run from Paul on this one point, because the great C.S. Lewis had something to say about this and it really was the beginning of this thought for me.
He writes in an epilogue in his collected works of "The Chronicles of Narnia" this:
"The modern view seems to me to involve a false conception of growth. They accuse us of arrested development because we have not lost a taste we had in childhood. But surely arrested development consists not in refusing to lose old things but in failing to add new things?" Here Lewis refers to enjoying the reading of children's literature, but I believe his point is applicable here.
To continue with St. Paul, he gains all by losing everything, so to speak, and that is the true conversion process. He is humbled, and chooses obedience. He is empowered, but continues to live humbly under the command and hand of the Lord.
We lead others in the conversion process in the most simple ways. One point I would make is that recently I witnessed a number of students at school dealing with the common "inconveniences" and pains of living in new situations with new people, etc... What was so shining in the midst of this vision was their acceptance. Please note I do not mean their complacence. Very much the opposite. It takes a strong determination, a fierce will and above all great love, to accept God's vision for yourself even when it may not be the ideal one you have contrived.
There you see the steps of conversion in action- following Paul's footsteps we are ousted out of our preferred dorm beds, left behind when our "friends" go out, and left wondering what on earth God was thinking when he gave us a blank page and said, "write."
Yet, we accept! We, lowered like the children we are, rejoice within our spirits as we realize the freedom brought to our souls when we submit and obey.
Paul did not envision himself writing one third of the New Testament... but the Lord did, and because he made the choice he began upon the path to converting himself into the image of Christ.
St. Paul wrote in 1 Corinthians 9:22: "To the weak I became weak, to win over the weak. I have become all things to all, to save at least some."
Here is the epitome of the conversion we are called to- that in imitation of Christ we would be able to say we to have become all for the sake of all.
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