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ST PAUL
It is no accident that as a young Sister I took the apostle Paul
as my patron and asked for the name of Paul. I had read the life
story of St. Paul and it inspired me. I was intrigued by his
movement from persecutor of the early Christians to champion of
Jesus Christ. He gave me hope. He was so human, so
contradictory, so aware of his limitations and yet yearning for
a larger vision and a greater life – a vision and life that he
realised he could find only in the living God.
He had been caught up to the third heaven and “heard things
which must not and cannot be put into human language”
yet he never became perfect. There was “a thorn in the flesh”
that reminded him that alone he could do nothing: with Christ
all things!
He could say with quiet assurance, “I live, now not I, it is
Christ who lives in me.”
And could proclaim with equal certainty, “I do not the things
that I would that I do, but the things that I would not that I
do, these are the things I do.”
I could resonate with this last. I knew only too well what it
was like to do “the things that I would not that I do.”
Paul points to the transformation from “I do not the things that
I would that I do” to “I live, now not I, it is Christ who lives
in me”. He gives us a number of guidelines as to how to get from
one to the other. He tells us to “put on” Christ, to have the
Mind of Christ, and exhorts us “…never grow tired of doing what
is right.”
He recognises the importance of thoughts and how they impact on
behaviour and urges us to, “Fill your mind with all that is
true, all that is noble, everything that is good and pure,
everything that we love and honour and everything that can be
thought virtuous or worthy of praise.”
And he
leaves us the example of his life, a life lived out of faith in
the risen Christ and in fidelity to a call to mission. ”Life to
me is Christ”,
he says. What he invites us to is no easy joy ride, rather he calls us to a life
of rigour and self sacrifice in the footsteps of a crucified
Christ. But with this he is not advocating the victim stance and
long faces of misery. Instead he cries out, “I want you to be
happy, always happy in the Lord; I repeat what I want is your
happiness.”
One of the great contemplatives of all time, he was also a man
of action who engaged the issues of his day fearlessly. He
spread the news of Jesus the Christ across the world of the
Mediterranean. He was convinced that Christ had come for
everyone – people of all nations and classes. “There are no more
distinctions between Jew and Greek, slave and free, male and
female, but all of you are one in Christ Jesus.”
He was persecuted, stoned, left for dead. Nothing deterred him
as he continued on his way which finally led to a jail in Rome
and beheading there. He lived in the consciousness of God’s
Presence and Action in his life and could exclaim, “In him we
live and move and have our being.”
What about us, how do we get from “I do not the things that I
would that I do” to “I live, now not I, Christ lives in me”? We
have Paul’s guidelines, but how do we translate them into
action? What happened to Paul on the way to Damascus was a
defining moment for him. It transformed him. We are far from
transformed. Generally we have to make a tedious, disciplined
journey to get from here to there. We seem to have so little
control over our mind, so how are we going to fill our mind with
all that is true, noble, good and pure? And how do we get past
the unconscious drives that attempt to subvert our intention and
take over our lives?
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