Seduced by Christ: The Damascus Event Seduced by Christ: The Damascus Event “During this year dedicated to St. Paul, let us get to know and love our Father. Let us pray to him and imitate him. St. Paul is a saint who spreads zeal. Sanctify the present and strain ahead! This is the Pauline spirit.” Fr. Alberione, 1957

Paul’s entire life was marked by what happened to him on the way to Damascus. Afterward, he was a completely different person. In a flash, the risen Lord pervaded and transformed his life. “Who are you, Lord?”

Faith and love were the only response the Apostle could make to the One who enveloped him in his light. Paul turned his back on all the elements that constituted his former life, ready to lose everything so as to be found in Christ.

For Paul, faith was not only an intellectual assent to the truth but the gift of his entire being to a Person. It meant participating in a dynamic relationship of love (cf. CD 7).

Paul said an irrevocable “yes” to Christ through an act of self-surrender… His conversion turned his perspectives and his value system upside down: it redirected him from the Law to faith…

Paul: a miracle of God’s mercy “But when God, who had set me apart before I was born and called me through his grace, was pleased to reveal his Son in me, so that I might proclaim him among the Gentiles...” (Ga. 1: 15-16)

The expression in me signifies an interior action. The mission Paul received was not only to proclaim Christ (an exterior activity) but also to witness to him - an action springing from a profoundly personal experience.

After Damascus, Paul was truly “a different person.” Before this event, he felt that he was in charge of his life. After it, he placed himself in the hands of God and said it was God himself who had set him apart before he was born so as to reveal his Son to him.

Paul was enraptured by Christ to the point that now only one treasure existed for him: Christ himself. His conversion was the act of a person madly in love: he cast aside everything he previously cherished so as to follow his beloved.

“What am I to do, Lord?” “Get up and go into Damascus, and there you will be told what you have been appointed to do” (Acts 22:10). Paul is asked to perform an act of self-surrender by humbly obeying someone he does not yet know. The Name he had fought against in good faith was the risen and glorious Lord.

Paul teaches us the irreplaceable value of faith In the light of his meeting with Christ, Paul realized that a new approach in his life was absolutely necessary. «The life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me» (Ga. 2:20). Paul, therefore, no longer lives for himself… He lives for and with Christ: in giving himself, he is no longer seeking and building himself up. From a talk by Benedict XVI

Paul and Fr. Alberione “You have conquered me like you conquered Saul” Like Paul, Fr. Alberione felt “seized,” obligated, conquered… “You have conquered me, like you conquered Saul. May everything be only and always in you and for you.”

Like Paul, Fr. Alberione understood that the whole person must be conquered, inhabited and directed by Christ: “Jesus must seize and conquer the whole person (…) up to the fullness and perfect age of Christ; up to the point that “It is no longer I who live but Christ who lives in me.”

“There is, as it were, a single personality: that of Jesus, who lives in us. It is very easy to say ‘Christ truly lives in me!’ But it is only when he thinks, loves, wills and works in us that there is unity, union. It is only then that love reaches its highest degree.”