by Jay Parini
The combination of elements here caught my attention. A holy madman?
I must see this for myself, if I could.
* * *
Having lost his sight, Paul was led by a kind soul to a house on Straight Street, near the loud, frenetic market where merchants sold spices and leather goods, silk and wool, knives of Damascus steel, trinkets, meat, eggs, and pigeons. Paul knew the city from earlier visits, and he sensed his whereabouts, hearing people shout and laugh, the cluck of chickens, the wheels of carts grinding through dirt and gravel ruts. Someone played a wooden pipe nearby.
In a hot room, with the shutters drawn, Paul sat on a low divan, unable to understand what had befallen him. Had he committed such a miserable transgression that blindness and isolation would consume his future? Would God ever forgive him?
Ananias had told me about Paul’s intention to punish our circle of blasphemers and heretics, which is how he viewed us. Peter in Jerusalem had forewarned my uncle about this fellow, saying in a note that a messenger delivered in the nick of time: “Beware of this rabid one, Paul of Tarsus. He is quite unhinged, a fanatic, possibly deranged and homicidal. He may do great harm to our movement.” Another member of our circle had studied with him at Gamaliel’s school and spoke of his intensity, calling him a fool who nevertheless had a command of the scriptures unlike anyone he had seen before.
But God spoke to my uncle in a dream, informing him that Paul had arrived a couple of days before, and that he would find him in a particular house on Straight Street, which was more like a cave than a comfortable dwelling: the sort of place that attracted no attention. This was important because the followers of Jesus already felt threatened by the Jews in Damascus, who dismissed their fanciful stories about a Christ who had come without a sword, who asked Jews to ignore the Law of Moses.
For three days Paul ate little, rocked in prayer, and begged God for mercy. He saw nothing but flickering spikes of light that actually hurt when they flashed, digging into his brain. He lived on bread and water and was sucked into an empty space, a deep mind well with no bottom.
I arrived with my uncle, and we sat on either side of him on the divan. My curiosity was piqued, and I will never forget my first impression: This wild man was clearly a prophet. A strange glow surrounded him, as if he were a fallen angel in human flesh. His eyes rolled like empty orbs, apparently seeing nothing. He winced and smiled and frowned. He spoke in an excessively loud voice, with authority, even in his great distress.
“I scoured the pit of darkness, below this earth,” Paul told us. “I was tempted. But God is faithful. He never allows temptation to exceed what a man can bear. He shows us how to endure it, how to find a way out.” In the depths, he told us, he spoke face-to-face with Ha-satan, the Adversary, who tempted him with glories. He was offered empires, principalities, a golden throne, a kingdom of his own to rule. But he resisted these enticements. He didn’t want an empire, he told the Wicked One. He wanted the eternal life that had been promised by Jesus, if Jesus wanted him.
“Does Jesus want me?” he asked Ananias.
“He does,” said my uncle, grasping one of his hands.
The room smelled of mud and sweat, and green flies swarmed with their brittle buzzing wings, and I could not breathe. My uncle stood over him, and Paul lifted his chin, as if looking into the sun.
“You persecuted the saints in Jerusalem,” Ananias said, with an unlikely hint of kindness in his voice.
“It is my shame,” Paul said, after a long pause.
Tears gleamed on his cheeks, then sobbing overwhelmed him. And yet Ananias made no effort to comfort him or intervene in this necessary struggle; he merely sat again on the edge of a bed and watched Paul weep, listening as he began to mumble phrases in an alien tongue. Foam seeped from Paul’s lips before he finally spewed a rank green vomit onto the floor. He knelt like a cat, then fell sideways, shuddering, and drew his knees to his chest. More foam ran from his mouth, dribbled into his beard. He had slipped back in time, returning to childhood. Or fallen into complete madness.
As a physician, I could not help myself. I knelt beside him and lifted his head slightly.
“I’m Luke, a physician,” I said. “And I’m visiting from Antioch, here with my uncle, who is beside you.”
“You are with the Christ?” Paul asked.
“Yes, the Christ lives in my soul.”
Paul began to shudder again, quaking so violently that I thought he would break his neck, so I held him to the floor, pressing myself upon him until he grew still.
When the fit ended, Ananias whispered in his ear, “Do you wish to turn away from evil?”
“I do.”
“Will you pray with me, Paul? And Luke?”
“Pray for us, uncle,” I said.
“Pray for me, sir, yes,” said Paul, with a spiritual hunger in his voice that moved me.
Ananias put his palms on the blind yet beseeching eyes, pressing his thumbs into the lids. He prayed intensely, lifting his voice: “This is your servant, Lord. This is Paul. You invite him now to preach to all the children of Israel, and to the Greeks as well. He will stand before kings and queens, proclaim the news of your kingdom, your advent in the world.” He waited for a moment. “You will do this, Paul?”
“I will.”
“As Jesus himself became the servant of his father, you shall be his servant. Remember that Jesus humbled himself, obedient even in death, losing himself in the flesh, finding himself in the spirit.”
With that, light filled the room for Paul, and the face of Ananias wavered into being. He saw the old face smile at him.
“I see you!” said Paul.
“Of course you do.”
* * *
I was present at the moment when Paul’s sight returned, and yet he seemed to forget my witness in the room, the fact that I could supply evidence from memory. In later years, I often heard him talk about how his sight returned to him that day on Straight Street. At times he claimed that actual scales fell from his eyes onto the floor like goose feathers and “disappeared miraculously” when he stepped on them. Once in a while he said that Ananias broke into an angelic voice, summoning the angels with a chant. “We heard tambourines, Luke and I, and Ananias—the tinkling of bells, and wonderful strange horns,” he declared, though I never heard these instruments of heaven. “Even the cherubim sang my name, a chorus of welcome.”
So odd, to hear these embellishments, which he could not resist, lifting them into the air as if to test their meaning, truth, and force. And yet the core of the narrative didn’t change.
At the end of this particular story about the experience in Damascus, he invariably intoned: “And the Light of God flooded the world, and I could see at last. There stood beside me Ananias my deliverer and Luke the physician, my dear friend Luke.”
Paul insisted that Ananias take him to the synagogue, only a short distance from the house of Judah, as in his new state of transformation he felt the urge to preach, to declare himself a changed man. The synagogue was familiar to him from earlier visits to Damascus, and he recalled the names of many Jews who worshipped there, and he thought they would never turn him away.
I followed them, curious to see what might occur. As it happened, we found only a handful of elderly Jews in the room, and they did not respond to Paul’s enthusiasm for the fabled rabbi from Nazareth. One or two raised a skeptical eyebrow at Ananias, a Greek whom few of them trusted, and the leader of what they considered an eccentric sect that had drawn too many Jews away from the fold.
I, a Greek stranger, meant nothing to them.
“Do you know the Christ has come?” Paul asked.
They shrugged, looking more with curiosity than anger upon this intrusion, although rage would follow.
“Who is this Christ they speak of?” one of them asked.
Paul blurted out his message, wh
ich was not so well refined at the time. I can recall their baffled faces looking up at him. Why was he breaking into their prayer circle in the synagogue? Was this the Jew supposedly sent by the Temple priests to help them deal with the Way, which had caused a good deal of annoyance and threatened their own existence by appealing to Jews and Godfearers alike? Had something gone amiss?
At this point a young man in a filthy tunic walked into the room with the help of a cane, his right leg withered from an affliction of early childhood. It could bear no weight, and he nearly toppled as he leaned forward. Paul saw an opportunity.
“Sir, the Lord Jesus can heal you.”
“What’s he saying?” the poor fellow asked, looking around the room.
The elders shrugged. They had no idea what Paul meant by this assertion.
“Come to me!” Paul cried.
The young man thumped toward Paul, and the elders sat forward in their seats.
One often saw magicians in this synagogue, sorcerers who laid claim to healing powers, but the thought of Paul in this role probably worried them. He looked possessed, his eyes flashing like hooks. His mouth twitched, and he blinked rapidly. I feel quite certain that a light surrounded his head.
“Come,” said Paul, motioning with a hand to the benighted fellow, who approached to within arm’s length, allowing Paul to lean into his face. “Will you kneel with me, sir? And what is your name?”
“I am Jesse.”
“Then kneel, Jesse. You are a gift to this community.”
With difficulty, Jesse knelt. He had learned how to do this in a manner that allowed him to crank himself to a standing position with the good leg while leaning on his cane. It was a maneuver he would avoid, or so I assumed, but he felt drawn to Paul and sensed an opening in his life.
“Believe me, Jesse, that Jesus is your Lord and Master. He can heal this leg, if you put trust wholly in his goodness, in the great goodness of God, our father in heaven.”
The young man dipped his head forward, and Paul put a thumb on his brow.
“Jesus is here,” said Paul. “He’s inside me, inside you, Jesse. I invite the spirit of the Christ to enter the body of this young man and to heal him! Heal him, dear God in heaven! In the name of your son, Jesus!”
Did the walls begin to shake at this point? Did the ceiling lift? Paul claimed they did, although I saw no such thing. But he often felt tremors that eluded others. I don’t doubt that, to him, the ceiling would appear to lift. His world frequently succumbed to trembling. It shook, even splintered and broke apart.
“Say aloud, with me: I love you, Jesus. God, make me whole!”
Jesse repeated this. And he wept now.
Suddenly throwing his cane to one side, a gesture that startled us, he rose and walked across the room with confidence and ease.
“I love God,” Jesse said.
The others murmured, and one of them left the building quickly. Perhaps he wanted to tell others about what had happened to Jesse. Nobody in Damascus could have expected this young man, whom they all knew, to walk again without great pain and the assistance of a cane.
Soon others came to meet this Pharisee who they assumed was an enemy of the Way of Jesus, an emissary of the Temple Guard.
“You are Paul?” someone asked. “You come from the Temple?”
“I’m Paul of Tarsus,” he said. “And yet the Temple of God is here.” His hand touched his breast. “Your own body is a Temple.”
* * *
That evening, a gathering of nearly two dozen Jews arrived at the synagogue, several of them upset about what they had heard, questioning the motives of this emissary from Jerusalem. They could not tolerate the idea of Paul as an advocate for the Way of Jesus and had never expected this turn, not from a Pharisee, a student of Gamaliel, an associate of the Temple Guard. To most of them, miracles were off-putting, and Damascus teemed with magicians and mountebanks who made outrageous claims for themselves. Their behavior invited scorn from the authorities, even censure. On the other hand, a man who can heal is always welcome, and several Jews brought relatives who were lame or sick before Paul, who prayed with each of them in turn. In many cases they were healed, though he made it clear that he did not actually do the healing.
“I heal no one,” Paul explained. “Only Jesus the Christ heals. He does so from within. He heals the soul first, then the body.”
The chief rabbi in Damascus at this time was Jacob ben Isaac, who called a number of elders to his house the next day, warning them that trouble might follow from the disruptions of Paul. “I’m not happy about what I hear,” he said. “Those from our tradition who turn against us, these are the ones who create the most trouble.” It was difficult enough to pursue the faith of their fathers in a city overseen by Aretas, a barbarous king who found enemies wherever he looked and punished them swiftly, without mercy.
No Jew felt safe in Damascus now.
Jacob’s council unanimously agreed that Paul must die. They could not afford to let him stir up trouble in Syria, and he had clearly become blasphemous, claiming to heal people in the name of Jesus and not the God of Israel. The sooner they killed him, the better.
They summoned a number of rough young men, laying a plot to kidnap Paul that night. They would take him outside the city walls, where he would be buried in the sand, stoned, then covered over. And nobody would complain to the authorities, who would be only too glad to see the end of this troublemaker from abroad, an alien from Tarsus, another crazy Jew.
But word of this scheme reached Paul, who often talked about what happened that night. I heard many versions over the years, and this again dismayed me because I had been there and seen everything with my own eyes. Did he not believe I had eyes and ears? And why could he never stick to one story, the true one?
“A woman in a white veil told me about this plan to kill me,” he might say. Another time: “God woke me in a dream while I was sleeping and warned me that I would soon be captured and murdered.” The messenger often changed but not the message. There was a modicum of consistency, at least. “I was packed into a laundry basket, then lowered over the city walls at night,” he would say. Or: “I insisted that they put me in a crate, which they tied with ropes, and pushed over the walls of Damascus.” Sometimes the basket went crashing to the ground. Sometimes it seemed “almost to fly” and landed far from the wall in a bed of reeds, although reeds would have been unlikely there, without a river nearby. The “bed of reeds” became “high grass” in due course, and this was probably not inaccurate. The reeds, perhaps, were a bid for an association with Moses in the bulrushes!
Once Paul told an amazed crowd in Antioch that he flew over the city walls. “I stretched out my arms and glided softly in the star-filled night after riding the wind for a good while. And with a company of angels as an escort.”
The angels ruined the story, I explained to him, and he never in my presence used that sullied version again. It was sheer megalomania, even madness. A basket would do, as I had been the one to fetch it, to attach the rope, and to help a few others lower him carefully over the city wall.
As I learned the hard way in later years, it didn’t pay to question Paul too closely, as it could cause him to bristle and fall silent for long periods. He disliked challenges, and the last thing I wanted was to alienate this servant of God, an apostle of our Lord, who had done so much to spread the news of Jesus to the far ends of the earth. Better just to let the stories breathe and carry the crowd, as they usually did.
I learned never to raise my hand in objection, saying, “But I was there…”
My assistance was useful to his missionary work, especially toward the end. He often drew on the sayings of Jesus and the parables I had culled from a variety of sources. The story of the lost sheep and the prodigal son were not broadly in circulation at the time, nor was the tale of the Good Samaritan, which Paul adored
and frequently employed. With ease, he folded my notes into his sermons, quoting my versions of the sayings:
Knock and he will open the door, seek and you shall find.
God will always give exactly what you require. He is your own dear father, and will a father deny a fish if his child asks for a fish? Will he offer a snake instead? Of course not. So imagine how much more generous will be your father in heaven than your father on earth!
I heard myself—my own voice—talking in Paul’s public addresses and didn’t mind this eerie ventriloquism: Jesus speaking with the help of scribes, his voice caught and fed through me to Paul, on and on. This is how the spirit moves, around us and within us. I had to trust in this fact of life, to accept it. God had something in mind for me, as he did for Paul. Our meeting in Damascus had been revelatory for me, and it determined the course of the rest of my days, though I didn’t know this at the time.
Chapter Five
PAUL
I could not afford to dawdle, given the hostility around me in Damascus, where both the Jews and the king’s men wanted me dead. Either of these groups, or some ruthless offshoot, might drag me behind the city walls, and I knew how this would end.
“Go now,” Luke, my new friend, had said. “And may God be with you.”
“If I could stay a few more days…” I didn’t know how to complete the sentence. Even saying it, I understood that to remain in this city was not possible. I had only begun to regain my sense of balance, and my vision needed to clarify. I could see, but not well, with streaks of orange-and-red light jabbing into the periphery. I would reach for something, and it would disappear. I stumbled over objects in my path. I mistook one of my sandals for a massive pit viper, which terrified me one morning when I woke, and my high-pitched scream horrified the others.