Tuesday 12 August 2025  Paul’s Conversion and Our Own

Richard writes of conversion as an experience of participating in divine reality: 

Before conversion, we tend to think God is out there. After transformation, God is not out there, and we don’t look at reality. We’re in the middle of it now; we’re a part of it. This whole thing is what I call the mystery of participation. Paul is obsessed with the idea that we’re all participating in something bigger than ourselves. “In Christ” is his code phrase for this new participatory life. In fact, he uses the phrase “in Christ” 164 times to describe this organic unity and participation in Christ. “I live no longer, not I; but Christ lives in me” (Galatians 2:20). “In Christ” is his code phrase for this new participatory life. 

It’s a completely different experience of life. I’m not writing the story by myself. I’m a character inside of a story that is being written in cooperation with God and the rest of humanity. This changes everything about how I see my life. A participatory theology says, “I am being chosen, I am being led, I am being used.” After conversion, you know that your life is not about you; you are about life! You are about God. You’re an instance of both the agony and the ecstasy of God that is already happening inside of you, and all you can do is say yes to it. That’s conversion and it changes everything.  

After conversion, you don’t experience self-consciousness so much as what the mystics call pure consciousness. Self-consciousness implies a dualistic split, with me over here thinking about that over there. The mind remains at that dualistic, either/or, and “othering” level. When we have a mystical experience, the subject/object split is overcome. Of course, we can’t maintain it forever, but we’ll know it once in a while, and we’ll never be satisfied with anything less. In unitive experience, we’re freed from the burden of self-consciousness; we’re living in, through, and with another. It’s like the experience of truly being in love. Falling and being in love, like unitive experience, cannot be sustained at the ecstatic level, but it can be touched upon and then integrated throughout the rest of our life. 

True union does not absorb distinctions, but actually intensifies them. The more we give of ourselves in creative union with another, the more we become our authentic self. This is mirrored in the Trinity: perfect giving and perfect receiving between three persons who are all still completely themselves. The more we become our True Self, the more capable we are of not overprotecting the boundaries of the false self. We have nothing to protect after transformation, and that’s the great freedom and the great happiness we see in converted people like Paul. As Paul puts it, “Because of Christ, I now consider my former advantages as disadvantages.… All of it is mere rubbish if only I can have a place in him” (Philippians 3:7–8). 

Father Richard Rohr describes the apostle Paul’s transforming encounter with the risen Christ, which changed Paul from a vengeful zealot into a universal mystic.  

Paul is probably one of the most misunderstood and disliked teachers in Christianity. I think this is largely because we have tried to understand a nondual mystic with our simplistic, dualistic minds.  

It starts with Paul’s amazing conversion experience, described three times in the Book of Acts (chapters 9, 22, and 26). Scholars assume that Luke wrote Acts around 85 CE, about twenty years after Paul’s ministry. Paul’s own account is in his Letter to the Galatians 1:11–12: “The gospel which I preach … came through a revelation of Jesus Christ.” Paul never doubts this revelation. The Christ whom he met was not identical to the historical Jesus; it was the risen Christ, the Christ who remains with us now as the Universal Christ. 

In Galatians, Paul describes his pre-conversion life as an orthodox Jew, a Pharisee with status in the Judean governmental board called the Sanhedrin. The temple police delegated him to go out and squelch this new sect of Judaism called “The Way”—not yet named Christianity. Saul (Paul’s Hebrew name) was breathing threats to slaughter Jesus’ disciples (see Acts 9:1–2). He says, “I tried to destroy it. And I advanced beyond my contemporaries in my own nation. I was more exceedingly zealous for the traditions of my fathers than anybody else” (Galatians 1:13–14). At that point, Paul was a dualistic thinker, dividing the world into entirely good and entirely bad people. 

The Acts account of Paul’s conversion continues: “Suddenly, while traveling to Damascus, just before he reached the city, there came a light from heaven all around him. He fell to the ground, and he heard a voice saying, ‘Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me?’ He asked, ‘Who are you, Lord?’ The voice answered, ‘I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting’” (Acts 9:3–5). 

Paul must have wondered: “Why does he say ‘persecuting me’ when I’m persecuting these other people?” This choice of words is pivotal. Paul gradually comes to his understanding of the Body of Christ (1 Corinthians 12:12–13) as an organic, ontological union between Christ and those whom Christ loves—which Paul eventually realizes is everyone and every thing. This is why Paul becomes “the apostle to the nations” (or “gentiles”). 

This enlightening experience taught Paul nondual consciousness, the same mystical mind that allowed Jesus to say things like “Whatever you do to these least ones, you do to me” (Matthew 25:40). Until grace achieves the same victory in our minds and hearts, we cannot really comprehend most of Jesus and Paul’s teachings—in any practical way. It will remain distant theological dogma. Before conversion, we tend to think of God as “out there.” After transformation, as Teresa of Ávila wrote, “The soul … never doubts: God was in her; she was in God.” [1]