What, in the end, are we to make of the apostle Paul? Luke, who loves him, is not shy about telling us of Paul’s occasional foolishness and blind spots. Paul has been converted, but like any convert, the old self still shows up with dispiriting frequency. Recently I had a chance to chat with the psychologist and author Kevin Anderson, who told me that he tries to avoid using the word “ego” in his work. Instead he talks about the small self and the large self. The small self is what I’ve been referring to as the ego up until this point (although now, thanks to Kevin, I’m going to change my language). The large self is the transformed soul, in harmony with God and all of creation. It is Paul’s small self that led him to appeal to the emperor when the crowd was threatening him outside of the barracks in Jerusalem. It is the large self that saw Christ on the road to Damascus. Even at this late moment in our story, this moment that is near to Paul’s death, both selves are still fully operative.

Which leads me to some final thoughts on the transformed self and the very process of transformation. I have talked about how Jesus’ main purpose on earth was to lead people into transformation, with the understanding that transformed selves will be able to aid the repair of the world. Since the beginning of Acts, I’ve talked about how, after Jesus ascended, his followers attempted to create communities that could foster transformation and cultivate the large self. And throughout this entire journey, my not-so-secret spiritual companion has been Teresa of Avila, and her book The Interior Castle.

So I’m going to give Teresa the final word on transformation.  The Interior Castle uses the metaphor of a castle with seven rooms to describe the spiritual life, and the metaphor is crucially important. We can easily translate it into our own lives by thinking of it as a house, rather than a castle. Oddly enough, at the moment I do live in a house with seven rooms – two bathrooms, three bedrooms, a kitchen area, and a living room. Throughout the day, I wander from room to room. Teresa’s metaphor is a little different, in that not all of the rooms of the interior castle are accessible until God’s grace opens the door to them. But once all the doors are open, she assumes that the soul will wander in and out of different rooms throughout the course of a day, just like I do. Even the person who has entered the seventh dwelling, where the soul rests entirely with God, will frequently mosey out of that dwelling and into the first dwelling, there the little skittering creatures of pride, insecurity, vanity, and shame are as common as dust bunnies. No soul lives within the large self all of the time.

In her section on the seventh dwelling, Teresa doesn’t spend a great deal of time describing union with God, which is, as she freely admits, indescribable. Instead, she muses over how the soul can live in the world after being transformed. She writes:

You may think that an experience like this would propel the soul beyond herself, that she would become so absorbed that she could focus on nothing else. Actually, when it comes to doing anything relating to serving God, she is more present than ever before. As soon as she finishes such a task, she rests again in that divine companionship. In my opinion, as long as the soul does not give up on God, he will never fail to make his presence known to her in a clear way. The soul has grown confident now that God will never leave her. He has granted her this incredible favor, hasn’t he? Why would he allow her to lose this precious gift? […]

If her consciousness of the divine companionship were always that intense, she would never get anything done! It would be impossible to think of anything else or to function and live among other human beings. Yet even if the light of this presence does not always burn quite that clear and bright every time the soul checks, that sweet friendship is there.

The transformed soul, then, is not in a constantly blissed out and otherworldly state. Instead, the large self is so well known, so alive and constant, that as soon as we slow down and reach out to the divine, the small self can fall away.

In this way, the spiritual life really is a practice. I learned to play guitar when I was nine, and have been playing it ever since, without ever really becoming very good. But I enjoy playing it from time to time. Sometime a year will pass when I don’t pick up my guitar at all. Yet as soon as I pick it up, the fingers of my left hand stretch into the appropriate chords. The knowledge of how to play is part of my body, now. It’s part of who I am. That is what the transformed self is like. Often in our daily lives we are beset with tasks that require us to walk around in different rooms of our metaphorical houses. Some of these rooms still have all the furniture of our small selves. But we can enter them without worry, because, when the little skittering beasts try to cause us fear and anxiety, we can simply cast our eyes towards the divine, and find that the music of our souls is still playing, that God’s sweet friendship is still reverberating within us.

 

And Saul approved of their killing him. This single sentence is key to what Luke is trying to convey in Acts. People are redeemable. A single evil act, even a series of evil acts, does not define an entire human life.

Luke must have heard Saul, who by the time he knew him had changed his name to Paul, tell this story many times. It must have been part of Paul’s regular preaching. We know that it was part of his letter writing. It was his own great repetitive story, the thing he talked about again and again, and it was the right story to tell. Of course, we as readers don’t know the whole story yet. He didn’t talk about his time as a persecutor of Christians without also talking about how he was converted on the Road to Damascus. What’s curious is that Luke doesn’t rush into the whole story at this point. Paul probably told it as a whole narrative, but Luke interrupts it. I think he must have loved and respected Paul, traveling with him as he did, but he also saw all of Paul’s weaknesses as well (we’ll hear more about them as Acts continues), and he never treats Paul with too much respect. So he breaks up Paul’s story, and tells us about Philip instead. This isn’t a digression. Luke is making a point. The story is about the Beloved Community, not any one member of it. The only member of the Beloved Community who gets their own biography is Jesus himself.

So both Paul and Philip are equally important, and it’s Philip who first goes off on a mission to convert non-Jews. He heads off to Samaria, and starts converting Samaritans, those ancient cousins of the Jews who were left in Israel during the Babylonian exile. He provides the pattern that Paul will follow. Or, rather, he follows the pattern that Jesus set, preaching, healing, and confronting evil. Paul will learn from, and follow, this example, coming to say, in effect, that this story is his story.

Your story is my story. That is the sentence that follows conversion, because conversion is not just an act of individual redemption. It isn’t a kind of exorcism, where demons are cast from the mind and the mind is swept clean. In Luke 11:14-54 Jesus makes clear that this isn’t enough. Conversion fills the clean and empty mind with a new story, a new way of thinking about the self, a new way of acting in the world. The part of Paul that approves of the killing of his perceived enemies can’t simply be redirected, so that he starts to approve of the killing of a different set of enemies as he joins a new group. If he’s truly to be converted, then he must learn a new way of relating to the world. He must be inhabited by the story that was told by Stephen and that is enacted by Philip. It must turn from violence to love, from inciting to preaching, from condemnation to healing, from using evil for supposedly good ends to rejecting evil altogether.