This last Saturday Christians celebrated the Feast of the Conversion of St. Paul the Apostle.  Like many people over the centuries, perhaps Caravaggio most compellingly, I find it a fascinating thing to observe – Saul the persecutor of Christians becoming Paul the Apostle to the Gentiles.  It raises an interesting question for me: Who am I? And equally: Who are you?

Identity

Sometimes when we ask, we’re just looking for a name – Paul, Khalil, Acacia, Tia.  Very often, we just cut to the chase and ask, “What do you do?”  As if that is the quickest what to answer who we are.  “Oh, you’re a doctor.”  “So, you’re a machinist.”  “You work in the kitchen.”  “A professor of Greek, how interesting.”  We pretend, or rather assume that these tell us everything we need to know.  The doctor prefers wine or bourbon; the machinist beer.  The professor votes liberal; the dishwasher doesn’t vote at all.  But as Chamamanda Ngozi Adichie teaches us, we like to reduce other people to a single story –he’s a Republican; she’s black; he’s a felon; she’s a philosopher, and from there follow an entire string of assumptions.  Sometimes these assumptions are based on some sound guesswork.  If you knew I was from Northeast Pennsylvania and were to consider my favorite baseball team, the New York Yankees would be a good guess, and you’d be right.  Sports teams are probably generally fine to make assumptions about, but I wouldn’t want you assuming too much else about me.  We typically don’t want others to think of us in such a superficial, boxed-in way.   No, superficiality and boxes are for others; we are complex, work and think with nuance, have lots of baggage and mitigating circumstances that explain who we are.  What if we could grant the same understanding to others or at the very least withhold judgment on others until we had more time to fill in the unknown and mysterious spaces. 

I grew up in a trailer park in Northeast Appalachia.  It’s a liminal place, Northeast Appalachia, as I would describe it.  Liminal because I grew up in the mountains, but lived only an hour away from New York City and all its sophistication, which at times could even cross the Hudson River, the Delaware River, a hill or two and down into my trailer park.   

A few other things: I’m white, cis-gendered, heterosexual, male, U.S. citizen, all the trappings of privilege; I grew up poor but am now financially secure.  All of which map out the limit of my knowledge and the beginning of my ignorance.  I don’t really care to have all these identities, but we have constructed them, and it would be disingenuous to deny or disown them.  They all signify something, whether I want them to or not.  Some of these identities can be liberating, my Appalachian background, or constraining and challenging, like my whiteness.

Conversion

Here’s another question: Do people change?  Or do they simply reveal who they are over time?  And when I say change, I mean really change.  Did Saul change when he went from persecutor to evangelist, or did something in his character connect to both those activities – zeal perhaps?  Certainly, we can develop new habits over time and train ourselves to do new things, often by necessity, like when I went from staying up until 4:00 AM reading and writing and drinking (yes, there are bars in Chicago open until 4:00 AM – it’s a wonderful city) to getting up at 6:00 AM so I could get a full-time job paying a full-time wage.  It was rough, but I did it, but I haven’t changed from a night person to a morning person; I’ve just revealed that I can adapt my sleep schedule to the demands of the working world. 

A few years ago, I became Christian.  I had been practicing Buddhism for about a decade before then.  Despite my best efforts, the hound of heaven succeeded in chasing me “down the nights and down the days.”  A word commonly used to describe such events is “conversion”. Conversion, conversio – literally “a turning around”, suggests a break, a clean break with what came before.  When I became a Christian, it was not a renunciation of my Buddhism.  Rather it was because of my Buddhism that I could become a Christian, and not just my Buddhism, but all my experiences that had led me to that point in my life. 

The ancient Greeks and Romans generally believed that people don’t change, that character is revealed throughout one’s life, unfolded like a scroll.  Hence the many exhortations to count no one happy until they are dead.  This may seem naïve to us, and antithetical to the modern American belief that we can change and choose our character as often as we like.  There is a certain liberation in that.  The revelation of character, however, suggests a continuity.  If I look back over my spiritual journey to this moment, I find not a point where I renounced a former set of beliefs, where I turned my back on a way of being, but rather a series of points that connect quite purposefully, that reveal how I have arrived here.  Books I have read, people I have met, experiences I have lived through, until I became revealed a Christian.  I do not wish to deny any part of myself or my experiences.  Though my understanding of character is incomplete – I need to learn more about the origins of that word – I would humbly describe my experience as a revelation of who I am. 

This is how it has happened for me.  Yet perhaps for you and Paul it has been different.  Maybe Paul was knocked to the ground and perceived that his life was entirely different from what came before.  Maybe you have changed by slow degrees until you have felt your life turn around almost imperceptibly.  I’m open to that possibility.

Vocation

It’s strange to say, but I’ve known what I’ve wanted to do with my life since I was six, when my family took a trip to Gettysburg.  I’ve always wanted to study and teach history.  Various routes led me to ancient history and the classics.  When I went away to college, I often felt very out of place and still in fact do in many ways; I was the first person in my immediate family to go to college, and really still the only one.  I think it’s partly why I decided to study Latin and Greek, something obscure and elitist, at least as it is traditionally understood.  I was always being told how as a working class kid I had to do something practical so I could pay some bill someone had waiting for me, but I really rebelled against that and figured if I’m going to get this opportunity, I’m gonna do what I want to do.  I racked up lots of debt with that philosophy, which I recently paid off, but that’s fine; I was free.

Although I heard my call at Gettysburg to become a historian at the young age of six, and indeed now teach history, I believe we are never settled beings; or at least we don’t have to be.  We do not one day find our vocation and then stop growing.  We may continue to seek, evolve, and change in our understanding of ourselves.  We can continue to reveal who we are.

We don’t expect trailer park kids in Appalachia to become writers or professors.  But they sometimes do that; they sometimes have to do that to survive – it’s not just about paying the bills.  You should know that trailer park kids don’t live on bread alone; they want roses too.   

Resources

The best way to see Caravaggio’s Conversion on the Way to Damascus, 1601, is in situ at Santa Maria del Popolo in Rome, but check it out here while you’re waiting to save the money for the plane ticket.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, The Danger of a Single Story.  Ted Global, July 2009.

Kwame Anthony Appiah, The Ties that Bind: Rethinking Identity, 2018.  See also his thought provoking article “There Is No Such Thing as Western Civilization,” The Guardian, November 9, 2016.

Francis Thompson (1859-1907), “The Hound of Heaven,” Poems.  1909.

For the Greek injunction to count no one  happy until they are dead, see the story of Solon and Croesus in Herodotus Book 1 chapters 29-33 and Sophocles Oedipus Tyrannus; Oedipus is perhaps the paradigmatic example of counting no one happy until death.