Conversion of Saint Paul the Apostle

Today we don’t remember a saint’s death but the day a man completely changed his mind. It’s the Conversion of Saint Paul: Saul sets out for Damascus to persecute the Christians and arrives there blind, on the other side. The account is in the Acts of the Apostles, and there’s a curious thing about it: it’s told three times, with some sizable differences from one version to another. Once Luke narrates it, and twice Paul himself tells it — before the crowd that was about to lynch him in Jerusalem, and then in Caesarea before the governor Porcius Festus and King Herod Agrippa. Three accounts of the same thing, as happens with every story you carry around for a lifetime. One detail is worth knowing, because we all have it wrong in our heads: **there’s no horse**. The fall from a horse is an invention of the artistic tradition, which needed a scene; none of the three accounts mentions it. Even the word “conversion” never appears: the text uses “call,” “choice,” and elsewhere Paul will say he was taken hold of. In Damascus he was baptized by a Jewish Christian named Ananias, and he got his sight back. And it was through Ananias — that is, through an ordinary man, not through a private vision — that he received the mission that would define his whole life: to go to the Gentiles, that is, to those who weren’t Jews. A good part of Christianity as we know it was born from there. If your name is Paul or Paula, today is your name day, even though the big feast is June 29, together with Peter. A man who was heading in one direction with absolute certainty, and found himself on the ground. It happens, and it isn’t always a misfortune.