Sermon for the Feast of the Conversion of St. Paul
“Be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind”
The Feast of the Conversion of St. Paul more often than not falls within the scope of the Epiphany season. Paul’s phrase from Romans is part of the epistle reading for the First Sunday after the Epiphany. It captures an important feature of the Epiphany and indeed of the nature of Christian life. Epiphany as teaching, as education, and as healing is also about epiphany as conversion.
But about conversion there is no end of difficulties. We have perhaps a rather skeptical if not negative view of conversion particularly in terms of religion. Paradoxically, it is really much more a feature of contemporary culture in terms of the ‘woke’ generation demanding that things be said and thought about only in one way and in complete contempt for any other way. We assume that it means a radical break from one position to another and as such retains a sense of opposition. We forget or overlook the more interesting and more comprehensive character of conversion. It really involves two moments: first, repudiation, and second, recapitulation. In other words, the apparent dramatic change from one position to another leads to a reappraisal and a recapitulation of the former position, a way of transcending simply the oppositional.
The story of the Conversion of St. Paul, the so-called ‘Damascus road experience’, is told by Paul three times in the Book of the Acts of the Apostles. In one sense, the story is personal and, in another sense, it is more universal. It belongs, I think, to the idea of epiphany as conversion in the sense of the break-through of the understanding. It is about coming to see things in a new and deeper way but that does not happen without a struggle, the struggle of the soul to grasp and understand. In other words, conversion is not a passive event, not something which just happens to us arbitrarily or inadvertently. It happens because of an intense struggle in the soul or mind. In this sense, conversion is an on-going affair. It belongs to education, to the constant transformation through the renewing of our minds, to use Paul’s pregnant, provocative and powerful phrase.
The word ‘transformation’ is literally metamorphosis, a radical change in our entire outlook and attitude of mind. That can happen dramatically or it can happen more gradually, it seems to me. Learning is about the activity of knowing in us that leads inescapably to changes in how we understand and see things. It means the willingness to see things differently, to challenge our assumptions and our attachments. This is wisdom; the realization of the problem about our attachments is a feature of the cultures of ancient Greece, of Confucianism, of Hinduism and Buddhism as well as a feature of the ascetic disciplines of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. It is intrinsic to the journey of the soul as a constant series of conversions of the mind to a deeper appreciation of truth. In other words, conversion is the dynamic of the mind’s engagement with the ideas that matter and which change us, the constant conversion to truth.
