“Out of jealousy and discord, Paul bore the price of patience. Seven times imprisoned, exiled, stoned, the messenger in the East and the West, received the illustrious glory for his faith. He taught the world all righteousness and came to the ends of the West, bearing witness before the authorities. Thus, he left the world and went in search of the holy place, he, which became the most illustrious example of patience.” Letter of Clement Roman to the Corinthians (1st century)
At the dawn of Christianity, no man did such intense work as Paul of Tarsus. A dynamic, broad-minded spirit brought together the three great cultures of the time - the Hebrew, Greek, and Roman; in short, the apostle par excellence.
No other man had a greater and more decisive influence on the historical evolution of Christianity than Paul of Tarsus. Across the east and west, he brought to the core of the young Christian community, innumerable multitudes of souls, peoples, and entire countries.
The existence of this singular man is divided into two periods, of nearly equal duration, but of a diametrically opposite character. One can even speak in two lives of this intrepid evangelizer, just as he also used two names, Saul and Paul: 30 years from Tarsus to Damascus, and 30 years from Damascus to Ostia. And in both the first and second phases, he plays his role integrally. A mortal opponent of obscure attitudes and undefined positions, Paul always carries out his task with body and soul, with every fibre of his being, with all the vehemence of his genius, with all the passion of his fiery nature. At first, he fights Jesus without respite or rest, because he sees in him the great enemy of revealed religion; and then worships him with the utmost sincerity of heart, and wants to see him worshipped throughout the world because he recognizes him as the Redeemer of mankind.
At the centre of Paul's life is the Christ - yesterday as an enemy, today as a friend; at first a target of hatred; later, the object of love and glorification.
Paul does not know half measures. He hates mediocrity. He is the authentic type of the integral Christian.
And in all this liveliness and enthusiasm there is no fanaticism; everything is ruled by calm rationality, which seems more western than eastern.
... At the gates of Damascus, the hour of awakening had sounded to the fierce persecutor of Christ: "Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me? ...
Saul falls to the ground - and it also crumbles the superb castle of his proud Jewish philosophy... Ruins and rubble ... No stone left unturned ...
So intense is the light of heaven that turns out all the lights of the earth. Saul is blind. Complete darkness for three days. It is necessary for a while for the earth to keep quiet so that the sky can speak ...
In this time of darkness, silence and introspection, Saul seeks to guide his thoughts through the unknown universe that has sprung into his soul.
"Who are you, Lord?"
"I am Jesus."
From this dramatic hour, one idea, one ideal dominates Paul: to make Jesus known, loved, and served by all men.
It was in this psychic disposition that the greatest pioneer of the Gospel began his stupendous career - whose greatness and prosperity bears eloquent witness, the "Acts of the Apostles" and the "Epistles" of Christ's incomparable messenger. From the beginning, he surrounded himself with a select and disciplined legion of helpers - men and women, young and old - and with them went out to the spiritual conquest of the world. For the sake of this ideal, he allowed himself to be persecuted and slandered, mocked and plagued, condemned to death and beheaded. And left behind, too, what hurt his heart the most, Abigail, Rabbi Gamaliel's adopted daughter, the passion of his life, which through the plots of fate was Stephen's sister, whom he had ordered to be stoned! But despite everything, in the midst of his sufferings, he writes: "My brethren, I am overflowing with joy through my afflictions. Christ is my life, and death is gain unto me, but it is the Christ who lives in me" ...
Paul is a book that only speaks of Christ.
He is a flame that only burns for Christ.
… a genius who only thinks of Christ.
… a will that only wants Christ.
… a hero who only fights for Christ.
… a soul that lives only on Christ, by Christ and for Christ’s sake.
The historical period that affected the life of Paul of Tarsus is strikingly similar to present times: the arrogance of pagan materialism on the one hand - and the dominance of religious fetishism on the other.
These two enemies — the materialistic paganism and fetishist Judaism — threatened to block the source of nascent Christianity.
Against these deadly adversaries of the Gospel descends into the arena the fearless gladiator of Christ.
The son of Pharisees clinging to a narrow religious formalism, Paul knew the danger that exists in the hypertrophy of the body and the atrophy of the soul of religion.
Educated in one of the greatest centres of Hellenic-Roman paganism, he experienced in his youth the disastrous action of grossly sensual paganism upon the higher aspirations of the human spirit.
The pagan, though impotent to rise from the abyss acknowledged at least its moral misery and thus held open the door to redemption - while the Jew, dazzled by the splendour of the liturgy, had lost track of its spiritual helplessness and sought to narcotize with the numbing of external forms the emptiness of its religious conscience.
And it was for this reason that Paul encountered the greatest obstacles among the Jews than among the pagans. For the Gospel does not remain silent in a soul that is not intimately convinced of its moral misery and the need for divine help.
The synagogue, after centuries of spiritualistic glory, has fallen into the idolatry of external formalities. "Whitewashed Tombs" - is the classic term Jesus coined to define the character of Israel's religious leaders: the hypocritical inner emptiness disguised by exuberant exterior ritualism. The worn-out ideology of traditional piety could not be the basis and norm for the vigorous spiritualist movement inaugurated by Jesus. Divine and pure at first, the Jewish religion had degenerated into this web of human exteriority, which did not satisfy sincerely religious spirits.
This, indeed, is the fate of all divine things: when they are thrown into the midst of men and given into unholy hands, they soon lose their original splendour, and instead of the fascinating beauty of this early form, there is usually the repellent deformity of a caricature.
The Gospel, born in an environment of religious decay was in danger of being grasped by the tentacles that built the empty formalism of the synagogue, which then bore the label of "revealed religion."
Jesus sacrificed his youth in the struggle against the tampering of religion and in defence of the spiritualist ideal.
Paul, his greatest disciple, follows Jesus’s example. At the gates of Damascus falls the fiercest advocate of mosaic ritualism, Saul the Pharisee - and the most ardent paladin of Christian spiritualism is born, as Paul the apostle. And from the beginning, he comprehends that the greatest danger to the Gospel lies in the exaggerated worship of empty formalities. Comprehends that it is easier to rise the building of Christianity in the valley of paganism than on the religious ruins of Israel.
The definitive triumph of the Gospel over pagan materialism and its preservation from the suffocating meshes of ceremonial Judaism was the titanic work of Paul of Tarsus. Christianity would also exist without Paul, but only God knows what the march of the Gospel would have been through the centuries if at dawn it lacked that clairvoyant spirit, this singular man who, indifferent to successes and failures paved the path for this new spiritual message through a world of obstacles and a hell of persecution; this man who has faced deserts and forests, climbed mountains and cliffs fearlessly faced the storms of nature and the wickedness of men, and planted the bloody flag of the cross of redemption on the farthest parts of the earth. Bolder than Caesar's own legions, this Pathfinder of God penetrates unknown lands and proclaims the name of Jesus where the imperial trumpets had not yet sounded ...
Man is truly great only when he has the courage to live his ideas and die for his ideals ...
What would Paul of Tarsus say if he returned in our day? Wouldn't it be necessary to release the Gospel once again from this octopus of a thousand and one empty formalities that threaten to choke the soul of Christianity? ...
The religiosity of millions of citizens is circumscribed by the disastrous evil of the external pomp, of the void voices and the exaggerated speeches in the pulpits, the theatrical performances, the lack of spiritual penetration, the lack of intimate conviction, the lack of clear awareness of the motives of their faith.
Most of the time, religiosity becomes the mortal enemy of religion! ...
The vast majority of members of official Catholicism is divorced from society, segregated from the world of the harsh and prosaic realities of each day. It does not care about the dust of factories, the discomfort of poor housing, the misery of the proletarians, the profane element of military barracks; they prefer to live in the warm atmosphere of religious mysticism, to listen to the suggestive melodies of a choir, to smell the sweet aroma of frankincense, to contemplate the burning candles and the flowers of the altars - while outside, pagan philosophers erode the foundations of faith and demagogues of all political parties stir the masses, poison the souls of the people and prepare the universal destruction of the Christian civilization of long centuries ...
It is therefore urgently necessary to return the Gospel right into the midst of the real-life of society and peoples. There is not one Sunday Christ and one Christ of the week; there is not one Christ of the churches and another of the society; there is one Christ, one Redeemer, one Mediator between God and men ...
Now, are needed an intense and persistent spiritualization campaign, evangelization campaign, interiorization campaign, "Christianization" campaign, and filtering out the impurities of traditional Catholicism.
If Paul reappeared, this would be his first and perhaps only work; restore to our dispersed and anaemic religiosity the vigorous Christ-centric character – to restore everything in Christ, as he wrote in the first century. The vast majority of Catholics still live in a vague, purely traditional Catholicism, in a kind of unconscious or semi-conscious sleepwalking; they know their "saints" and ignore Christ; they mechanically recite their devotional's formulas, but they never read a single page of the Gospel - they live and die without having discovered the spirit of Christ and the soul of religion ...
Hence this religious coldness of the people. Hence this craze of enjoyment and pleasure. Hence the stupendous ease with which they embrace any ideology that presents them in sympathetic colours, the person and doctrine of Christ or other prophets and spiritual masters, where they claim to be the only way of salvation. So, it is no wonder the bloody struggle in which different religious creeds are debated!
"The kingdom of God does not come with an outward apparatus - the kingdom of God is within you" ... "In your midst is the one whom you do not know" ...
These days, when the Gospel is ignored by most who should know and live it; when the religion of many are reduced to simple ceremonies, rites and formulas; when the creed is divorced from the commandments of God's laws, and ethics in conflict with those who indulge in spiritual practices; when countless men see in religion something doubtful, less worthy; when the paganism of beaches and casinos, streets and halls belie the Catholicism of churches and processions - today, more than ever, it is important to throw into the midst of this twilight environment of spiritual stagnation the vigorous dawn of a youthful and strong Christianity, and to plan in the eyes of the world the profile of a man who knew how to live his faith in the spirit of Christ in every act of his life.
Paul of Tarsus, when spiritually intuited, reveals himself as a prophet beyond time and space, a seer of Cosmic Reality, a messenger of the eternal Present, equidistant from the past and the future. His words should not be analyzed intellectually, but lived intuitively. He, the greatest pioneer of the Gospel, is quite a banner for today, he who reduced to a perfect unity the dualism between faith and life, to the point of exclaiming: "My life is the Christ; I no longer live - Christ lives in me".
No comments:
Post a Comment