The Chia Pet Clause

I've been spending a lot of time this week thinking about Saul on the road to Damascus. How, in an instant, it was revealed to him that he was both utterly wasting his life and hurting the source of all life itself: Love itself, it its chiefest and most glorious manifestation. A glory intense enough to strike him blind.

I mean, holy shit. What a revelation. This is the kid who stood by holding coats for the men who martyred Stephen. He was fearsome enough that Ananais, in the midst of an unambiguous revelatory moment in which God himself commanded he help Saul regain his sight, tried to bag out. Ananias did it, of course-- it's the Book of Acts, not Refused-to-Acts-- but Saul's transformation is swift and sure and groundbreaking enough that the Church itself is built on, with, and through the rubble.

Bur first, poof! He more or less disappears for 14 years.

That's pretty insignificant when you consider all he went on to be and preach and write, but when I consider that to accept God is to both accept his love and be called to love others, I can't help wonder if Saul/Paul's conversion took that long to marinate. Unless we're sadistic or completely mentally unsound, when we persecute others, we work out a way that it's for our own good. We create a narrative in which our actions are reconfigured as something inevitable or necessary. And we can, like Paul obviously did, build a life around that narrative. But when we're confronted with Jesus' radical sacrifice and radical forgiveness of every wrong and misguided part of ourselves, and we want to reach out and claim that forgiveness and the new life it entails, we realize that to live in Christ means we must rise with Christ. And that rising is impossible unless we embrace those we've configured to be the exact opposite of ourselves. We must love those whom we hate, be their faults real or imagined. We have to be willing to revise and resubmit the stories by which we've lived our lives, and that can take some time.

Saul had some pretty good reasons for hating early Christians. Jesus had done much that ran counter to the Pharisaic interpretations of Mosaic law and purity codes to which Saul pledged his life, and Jesus had the audacity to claim that in doing so, he was fulfilling Messianic prophecies. When you consider how much backlash there's been just over the reclassification of Pluto from planet to planetoid...



and the fact it turns out Brontosaurus never even existed...



let alone how freaked out everyone was when Miley Cyrus cut her hair...



it begins to sound reasonable to me that Saul found a lot that was distasteful about Jesus and his revolutionary ideas. I mean, people hate change, and Jesus inaugurated a thorough and powerful slate of it. Many Jews saw that change as bad and actively sought to persecute those whom they felt were persecuting them. The only thing that can stop this sort of circuitous hate fest is a radical demonstration of love, which is exactly what Saul experienced when Jesus showed up on the way to Damascus.

This is all just conjecture, of course. Maybe Paul was building up Christianity in a series of small, undocumented ways during those 14 years off the record, or maybe we just don't have the documentation anymore. The fact remains, however, that before Paul became the uber-Christian missionary that authored half the New Testament, he had to abandon the hate-filled persecutor that gladly stood by while another man died for proclaiming Christ crucified. Maybe that took a little time.

Quite frankly, it comforts me to think it wasn't easy. When I consider that oftentimes, loving those we hate means we must forgive those whom have hurt us, I experience a pretty intense desire to disappear from the record myself for 14 years or so. Life can deal out some painful blows; often, the more pain that's involved, the longer it takes to heal. But if I am truly committed to striving to be Christ-like, it's obvious in an elementary sort of way that the main gift afforded me by way of the cross and resurrection is the one I'm called to regift over and over and over again. It's the Chia Pet clause of Christianity: the forgiveness which I've been given I must pledge to give over and over again to others, no matter how stringently I resist.

No matter how deeply I've been wounded.

That is something I'll be struggling with this Lent. As I repent and work to be reconciled for my own shortcomings, it is imperative that I extend reconciliation to those whom it would just be easier to forget. It is always easier to do nothing and maintain the status quo, but it is always better and ultimately more rewarding to do the painful work of reinstating love.

I just wish it weren't so hard, but I hope that, eventually, I will with God's help.