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| Caravaggio's Conversion of Paul |
God’s word in the book of Sirach is about the art of living well in the best sense of the phrase. Hard work, honesty, integrity, compassion, responsibility, courage, and faith in God are the true measure of character. The author says God definitely hears our prayers. It doesn’t seem so sometimes. Yet, our faith challenges to trust in God’s unconditional love for us, his desire for us to turn all toward goodness.
In the Gospel according to Luke, we have the odd couple. The pharisee is full of himself: he thought that his laundry list of deeds made him pleasing to God. But he was ego centered. EGO stands for “easing God out.” On the other hand, the prayer of the tax collector was God centered. He is a model of prayer for us, says Jesus.
Paul, in his letter to Timothy, uses sports imagery to describe his own life and ministry: “I have fought the good fight; I have finished the race; I have kept the faith.” Despite obstacles, Paul stays the course, preaching the Gospel. He urges us to do likewise.
What fascinates me is St. Paul’s reflections about his life. He was well educated in philosophy. He had been a persecutor of Christians. But Paul became one of the greatest evangelizers in Christianity. This religious genius established faith communities throughout the eastern Mediterranean, authored letters shaping the history of Christian thought, and eventually was beheaded by Nero.
Paul had keen insight into what makes human beings tick. Everyone yearns for happiness. But we often do things that we think will make us happy, only to discover that they end up making us miserable. We confuse “pleasure” with “happiness.”
Etched into Paul’s vision of human beings were Jesus’s words: “I have come so that they may have life and have it more abundantly.” For Paul, discipline is the path to the fullness of life. Think about it. When we eat well, exercise often, and sleep regularly, we feel more fully alive physically. When we love, when we give of ourselves to help others, we feel more fully alive emotionally. When we study the marvels of the human spirit in various cultures, our world expands, and we feel more fully alive intellectually. And when we take a few moments each day with God in prayer, humbly and openly, we experience more fully the transcendent dimension of our lives, the spiritual.
Discipline sets us free to attain our ultimate purpose: life with God. Freedom is the strength of character to do what is good, true, noble, and right.
Paul grasped this and preached that Christ came to reconcile us with the Father, and in doing so, Christ satisfies the craving for happiness that preoccupies our human hearts. It is ultimately a yearning for friendship and intimacy and relationship with our Creator. Christ, for Paul, is indeed “the way, the truth, and the life.”
