Learning to See

We are our stories; they speak truths about our lives. Our stories reveal how we are formed and what is important to us.

We are people of story.  What we tell and how we tell it out of the vast novel of our days reveals much about how we understand ourselves and what we value.

You may be familiar with the story of Paul from the book of Acts. A learned Pharisee and persecutor of early Christians, he was struck blind on the road to Damascus. In that moment he hears God call his name and ask what’s up with this persecution of Christians? Paul, as a result becomes a changed man. The path of Christianity is forever changed because of Paul’s witness.

When it was Paul’s turn to tell his story, he tells it three times.  In the book of Acts the story of Paul’s encounter with the risen Christ is told three different times.  It isn’t a product of poor editing, but rather a beacon shining on the sentinel story of one man’s life.  Each telling is slightly different, but the story always contrasts light and darkness, seeing and blindness, and a voice that can be heard only when the familiar way of knowing life is compromised.

It’s when he is blind that he hears.  It is not coincidental to the story.  It bears witness to what happens when the familiar is stripped away. In the absence of the familiar we reach for different things, hear different truths, embrace parts of the story that are often silenced by the daily-ness of life. 

When Paul cannot see, he is more able to hear.  And, as you may remember, he was also knocked flat on his butt. That is not coincidental to the story either; it reveals another way that Paul’s sense of mastery and control over his life was suspended for the sake of a new insight. His usual defenses and perceptions were temporarily disabled for the sake of a new and life changing message.

I doubt that many of us will be flattened on the road and rendered blind. Yet the twists and turns of our days can occasion a moment of divine insight that might pass us by if we are strictly working on our own steam.

Most of us construct a narrative of our lives that is comfortable.  We have a ready answer to questions like, where are you from, what do you do, what are your hobbies, where did you go to school, do you have children, what about grandchildren, where do you live…and the like.  Such narratives tell a part of life that is manageable.

We seldom speak of what really forms us; the  greatest moments of despair, the joy that renders us speechless, the insights that are hard won out of struggle or the knowledge that is the fruit of study that never sees a classroom.  It is the story within the story, the narrative that lingers under the surface of the story we claim.

When it’s Paul’s turn, he doesn’t give his pedigree: a Pharisee, a learned man, from the right side of the tracks, and a zealous keeper of the law and the tradition.  He tells about the time his life changed, when he had an insight so powerful that he could only speak of it in veiled language. There were no words. He can only point to it by constructing a powerful story about not being able to walk and not being able to see. And it isn’t once or twice, but three times. 

For all my struggles with Paul, and there are many, this narrative sits down beside my feminist edge and beckons to a different place.  He sets a model for telling the story that is THE shaping story of his life; the narrative that lies under the surface yet defines the entire landscape.

And all of the revealing, all of the vulnerability is for the sake of what is possible.  It is never for himself only that he tells his story, but for the sake of the growing community that he is now trying to nurture.  Almost as if to say, if God can do this with me imagine what God can do with you. 

Think about it.