The Year of Saint Paul

The Year of St. Paul began on June 28, 2008 and it seems right to make note of it before it recedes in the revelries of summer, beginning with Fourth of July celebrations tomorrow. Prior to St. Paul’s conversion, he persecuted the Church and "was trying to destroy it" (Gal. 1:13). Paul recognized that his former sin marked him, calling himself "the least of the apostles, unfit to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the Church of God" (1 Cor. 15:9). But Paul also knew why he was an apostle, a saint in the Church of God: "by the grace of God, I am what I am" (1 Cor. 15:9). Sometimes, I think, the burdens of past sins keep us from the sainthood to which we are called. Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, it is told, know something about sin. It is not mine to judge, since I have never met them and they never return calls, but we all know something about sin, and we can find our own woundedness so great it seems impossible to rise above it. In a Rolling Stones’ song, "Saint of Me", Jagger and Richards plumb the sins of a couple of saints, and their subsequent conversions, including that of Saint Paul: "Saint Paul the persecutor was a cruel and sinful man Jesus hit him with a blinding light And then his life began I said yeah I said yeah." In this verse they reference Paul’s sinful past as a persecutor of Christians before his Damascus Road conversion, but in later choruses and verses boastfully, or perhaps humanly, state that they themselves are not on the same road as Paul: "I said yeah, oh yeah, oh yeah You’ll never make a saint of me Oh yeah, oh yeah You’ll never make a saint of me." Why? The threat of suffering and martyrdom seems to be one of the reasons: "And could you stand the torture And could you stand the pain could you put your faith in Jesus When you’re burning in the flames?" The reality of martyrdom, of the suffering that St. Paul proudly states marks him as a follower of Jesus, can frighten those who fervently want to be saved: "And I do believe in miracles and I want to save my soul and I know that I’m a sinner I’m gonna die here in the cold I said yes, I said yeah." "Saint of Me" brings to bear a powerful force in human life: the sense of Augustine’s "I want to be healed, but not yet". Anyone who reads St. Paul’s story, scattered throughout his letters, sees a frail human being transformed by Jesus Christ into one able to persevere and accept all things that afflict him due to the power of his encounter with Jesus Christ and the Gospel. Jagger and Richards give us a sense of the human being faced with giving oneself over to the power of Jesus Christ, but drawing back from the possibility either due to fear or the sense that one’s sinfulness is too deep to be healed. There is, indeed, a fear that to be a saint is possible, but it means giving up too much and, perhaps even more, accepting too much. As we enter the year of St. Paul, let us remember the model of the one who gave himself fully to Jesus Christ and who did not let his manifest sinfulness stand in the way of saying, "make a saint of me." In fact the term that Paul uses more than any other in his letters to describe his fellow Christians is the Greek hagioi, "holy ones," or saints. You’ll never make a saint of me? Paul argues that this is our very call and it is to this that we need to answer "yes, I said yeah." John W. Martens