Saul didn't deserve to become Paul

Feast of the Conversion of St. Paul
Celebrated at the Altar of St. Benedict
in the Basilica of St. Paul outside the Walls
on Jan 25, 2009 during the year of St. Paul
and on the occasion of a pilgrimage to the Basilica and the Monastary of Tre Fontagne

Today we celebrate a great mystery The mystery of vocation.

Jesus reminds us today: that we did not choose Him but rather He us. And He did not choose us because of our righteousness but rather, inspite of,in fact, because of our sinfulness He chose to save those in need of saving! As He says: the healthy have no need of a doctor we need our divine physician because all of us struggle in one way or another wnder the weight of sin.

Why did Jesus choose and call Saul of Tarus? Our prideful intellect wants us to say it was because…
Because He had great plans for Him—God did.

Or because of the great sign of hope that the conversion of one of their chief persecuters would be to the early Church—it was.

Others might even argue that that Paul’s was not a true conversion, because for Paul Jesus was simply the fulfillment of his Judaism. They argue that unlike the other pharasees, Paul was truly zealous for the Lord, for truth, persecuting the church out of ignorance, not pride—he was

In truth Saul of Tarsu was many things, like all of us, he had his virtues and vices, and while his conversion was a blessing for the early Church and clearly a central part of God’s providential plan for salvation The reason God called Saul, is the reason God calls and saves each of us. Nothing Paul did or said, or would do or say, merited Pauls call and conversion. Rather God calls us and saves us, primarily because HE LOVES US.

Sure He has a plan for the world, after all He made it, and the world continues in existence only because He remains interested in it. He has a plan for each of us, too, but our cooperation in His plan is at the same time essential and trivial. Essential because God made the world for this reason so that Man would be His image and likeness in the world. And Trivial because man’s contribution alone could never bring about the consumation of the world.

Brothers on this feast of St. Paul’s conversion we must contemplate this mystery and come to understand this reality. God who is all powerful, and all-knowing never acts, except out of freely given Love. I think we understand this conceptually but too often our way of acting betrays that our hearts have still not grasped it.

Like St. Paul we have been called by God not because of what we might do for Him or the Church but because He loves us; and while, please God, our vocation, like that of Paul, may be the occasion for the salvation of many souls, primarily, we have received our vocation from God for the good of of our own

I think that this is esp. hard for men to accept. To understand this—to understand our own uselessness is to begin to understand the economy of what God did for us, the gratitude that we owe to God for doing it,and the type of love that we should try to mimic in our relationship with our neighbors. This love is possible, for us, as for Paul because of the light of Jesus Christ which in the mystery of the altar we are about to receive.