Abstract
Standing on Straight Street two years ago, in the heart of Damascus, I was acutely aware of the way I’d made Paul a marginal footnote to faith. I appear to persist with my preference for certain lyrical passages of prose, and for preaching on the Pentateuch. Growing up in a relatively liberal, feminist enivronment of Biblical interpretation it became something of a common-place to dismiss Paul and to squirm a bit at his views on women, to stress the stretch of cultural difference and to talk about contextualising.
It’s not that I was expecting a Damascus Road experience, or to see a wee figure passing through that window in the wall in a basket, but as a place where these narrative scenes were brought alive for visitors I was aware of looking for the dead among the living.
Our hosts arranged for us to meet some of the estimated 1.2 million Iraqi refugees hosted by Syria as a result of the U.S/U.K war in Iraq. We heard them tell of the horrors of the war and their grief and then were led by them into the Damascus Souk, in search of damask cloth, scarves, spices – led by exiles into an everyday Syrian world. When I emerged from the market I was dizzy with astonishment at the encounters, the stories, the freedom, forgiveness, the grace. I find myself wondering and praying daily for these friends as the crackdown continues in Syria and the bodies pile up in the struggle for freedom, I find myself hoping I may still find the living amongst the dead.
Yet, separated by worlds, past and present, by language, by profoundly different understandings of the order of things, I find that like Paul, I’ve been to Damascus, seen light and found forgiveness. Like Paul, perhaps thanks to Paul I remain profoundly in thrall to the idea and experience of grace. Like Paul I write letters, and like Paul some letters are scribed for me by others and sent in my name. I haven’t personally experienced a ship wreck, but I know those who have, and their descriptions are enough for me to feel a connection to Paul’s own. I’ve not spent time in prison for my faith but I have visited others in prison who fear for their future and their lives, as refugees awaiting deportation. Like Paul, I’ve stood in public places and spoken of God’s love and grace, and worried away at the way we are, as churches and communities, as I and others with me find ourselves enmeshed in systems of structural violence and injustice. Like Paul, I’ve felt utter frustration and betrayal by a variety of churches and religious institutions, and impatience at the strangeness of interpretations, practices and understandings that are not in line with the way I see things. And like Saul, I know I’ve stood, in younger days, in a baying playground crowd, holding coats as an angry mob of my teenage peers shouted “fight, fight, fight, fight!”
I say this, not to suggest any equivalence but simply to point out that although separated to by two millennia and cultural and historical distances which are inconceivable, there is much to share. There remains a common story in the ways Paul and his scribes narrated his life and shared it with those they would be bound to in solidarity, friendship, love and struggle.