The Damascus Road

by Jay Parini

  In truth, I felt much relieved by his decision. Rome without Paul was, for me, no destination I could imagine. I would instead simply return to Antioch by myself, bidding Julius farewell in the Italian port. Summer was, indeed, a good time for sailing, and I would have no trouble finding transport. I would miss Paul sorely, though, and perhaps might have remained with him to the end on the island.

  In these months we had come to adore Julius, and Paul picked his memory for stories of his childhood, his youth in Rome. He grew up in a fine villa near the Palatine Hill, which Paul recalled was where Cicero had lived. His father moved in legal circles, and his family were aristocrats (“of a lesser variety,” Julius would demur). He had been apprenticed to an influential lawyer, living in the man’s home on the Aventine for three years. As was customary, Julius sat with the distinguished advocate as he consulted with clients, learning by listening or pursuing minor tasks. He accompanied his master to the Forum three times a week, acting as his scribe at one point. He was expected to wed the eldest daughter in the family, who was, as Julius remarked, “seven years my senior, with rust-colored teeth and stooped shoulders.” Her breath smelled of “long-abandoned eggs.” This marriage of convenience held no appeal for a handsome young man, however ambitious, and Julius rejected the opportunity to don the toga virilis of a gentleman and professional, preferring a military life.

  With his aristocratic connections and legal training, he rose quickly in the ranks of an expanding imperial army. One day, as Paul boasted on his behalf, Julius might become a general, although our centurion liked the idea of politics as well. He would make a wise provincial governor, I suggested, addressing him as Pompey the Great.

  Julius batted away this compliment. “Pompey’s end was ignominious,” he said, and recalled his assassination in Egypt.

  “I meant the early Pompey,” I said. “The consul, part of the Triumvirate.”

  “I’m no Pompey,” Julius said. “Early or middle, even late.”

  I watched Paul carefully now, as he seemed both eager and reluctant to leave our new island home. One night I saw him sitting on the grass, under starry skies, where he studied a small creature, perhaps a small hyena or rat, as it nudged its way into a tuft of moonlight. I drew close to him. “You don’t have to come,” I said.

  “I do, in fact. You were perfectly right.”

  “You’ve given everything. There is no need.”

  “No,” he said. “I seem to be alive. As long as I breathe, I must continue to speak for the Christ.” After a pause, he said, “I have heard a voice, and it calls me to Rome.”

  “To Rome, then,” I said.

  * * *

  When the fair winds began to blow from the south, we boarded a merchant ship, another Egyptian vessel, though it bore no resemblance to our lumbering, ill-fated grain ship. I admired this vessel, with its prow distinguished by the figures of Castor and Pollux, the twin servants of velocity. As before, Paul ingratiated himself with the pilot, showing off his navigational skills. He kept a close watch by night, sighting the pole star and making the appropriate calculations. He might well have been a sailor in another life, although his bad luck with sea journeys suggested otherwise.

  “You have studied the heavens,” the pilot said to him.

  “I’ve been there,” Paul said.

  The pilot grinned, but this was not a joke. Paul’s infrequent but memorable vaultings into the upper heavens remained a key part of his sense of himself as an apostle of the Lord, a man changed forever on the Damascus Road. He already knew what it meant to rejoin the Almighty in the third heaven, to stand before the Ancient of Days, and I envied this.

  My own spiritual longings had less clarity and occasion. I would make my way to God in my own time, I knew that with certainty. But I would never leap in the same fashion as Paul. That heavenly country, where the saints gathered in concert, illumined from within by God, would remain a fond wish, achievable in the course of time but still distant, an imagined destiny. For now, I must fare forward, mile by mile.

  Favorable winds abaft the stern created a steady blow that drove us into the Sicilian port of Syracuse within days. We made our first landfall in Ortygia, where more than a dozen other ships anchored offshore in calm, clear water. I loved it there, with quivering schools of gold-and-silver fish below us. Houses tumbled down the hillside, their red-tiled roofs gleaming, while the Temple of Apollo loomed above the harbor, a grand example of human invention. It took away one’s breath, with columns that formed a colonnade beneath its portico. One or two men in white togas strolled and talked, and their tiny shapes reminded us how tall the temple must be.

  Julius said, “Think how they carried those columns uphill, and managed to erect them as well.”

  Like me, his mind often turned to practical details, while Paul, as ever, remained in the heavens. Ancient temples had simply fallen to the earth from the ether or sprung, like mushrooms, from the dirt. In our travels, I never saw him pause to admire the Roman facility for the construction of aqueducts or bridges, or their ingenious use of reservoirs and cisterns. The miracle of Roman roads never failed to impress me. But I was a different sort of person, one who longed to see the architectural wonders of Rome.

  Julius had tantalized me with his memories of this great city, talking at length about the genius that lay behind the construction of the Pantheon, even though Paul disliked hearing about it. “God will find a better use for this building one day,” he said.

  Increasingly, he spoke of “one day,” which was surely not “tomorrow.” The Kingdom of God unfolded at the Lord’s own leisurely pace, and we could hardly hurry the Almighty, who probably found our impatience both tedious and insulting. Why could we not simply trust him?

  I could hardly help but notice that Paul’s message carried less urgency than earlier, though it had become more interesting and complex, as least in my view. He told Julius that “God arrives in us each day,” and the Kingdom of God was “always and now, alive and everywhere.”

  Mere equivocation? Perhaps. Or an adjustment to realities.

  Julius took some convincing on this point, but in this he hardly differed from me, another of those who tend to count, weigh, and measure the things of this world. We see shapes and sizes, pinch points and parallels. We admire calendars and rules, their discreteness and specificity. Paul resisted all calculations along these lines, gesturing to the sea. “Listen to the surf, its rote insistence. How many times does it lunge to the shoreline and retreat. Is God counting the waves?”

  He compared time and eternity to rivers and the sea. “We flow into God,” he said, “trickling through the landscape, smoothing the pebbles, sloshing our banks, spilling over in seasons of flood. In dry times, we disappear underground, with hardly a trace of us.”

  I tired of these similitudes but had grown used to them, had even begun to adopt them. One accommodates to the modes of discourse that surround one, as close friends and companions in due course adopt a common tongue. I think I pushed Paul a little further in the direction of simplicity, plainspokenness, and concision as a consequence of his being my friend. But he could relapse, growing long-winded, even vaporous, though I liked to believe that my company made this kind of talk less likely.

  We disembarked in the Ortygia harbor, with Paul eager to seek out a synagogue at the western edge of the city where a legendary rabbi named Yohanan had led a vigorous congregation for several decades. Paul remained alert to significant teachers throughout the empire, and he noted that Yohanan had written scriptural commentaries that had circulated in Jerusalem. He and Paul had exchanged letters at one point, although when I pressed him, Paul was reticent. I think he imagined that most people agreed with him and tended to discard opposition or counterarguments as mere annoyances. I wondered about Yohanan, who was reputedly a defiant and self-involved fellow.

  Paul had lost a good deal of his argumentative v
igor and had withdrawn while in Malta in ways that surprised me. I had never quite seen this version of the apostle, the old man with his white scruff of a beard who sat for hours in spring sunlight with his face lifted to the sun, occasionally smiling, even laughing to himself. He often spoke softly under his breath, as if conversing with spirits. Where was the ferocity, the torch, that passion that had made him the great apostle? But any flame dies, and it was possible that Paul’s visionary fire had been extinguished and only embers remained.

  All of us become cinders in the end. Some die on their feet, as my father had. I had seen the old fellow sleepwalking in Antioch and scarcely able to recall his own name. I addressed him respectfully to the end, as duty required, but he barely acknowledged me. A slight nod, perhaps, was all I could expect. In conversation, I had to supply memory, asking if he recalled this time or that. An occasional spark might glimmer, briefly even reignite. But never for long. Silence had become his preferred tongue.

  In the end, as in the beginning, there is only silence.

  Now Paul asked to visit Yohanan.

  Julius said, “We depart in three days for Rome. So keep track.” He himself was treating the apostle like an elderly man.

  I looked at Paul, who glanced at the pavement. What was on his mind? Did he realize that Rome might well pose the greatest challenge to us yet, an opportunity to consolidate so much of what we had labored to achieve but with pitfalls one could hardly begin to calculate? Julius had seemed uneasy about the prospects for the Way in Rome, although he would never elaborate.

  We found the synagogue in a winding alleyway behind the amphitheater. Sitting on a low stool, Yohanan looked up without seeing us. As he would, Paul got his attention, saying, “I am Paul, an apostle of Jesus the Christ. We knew each other in the past and have exchanged letters.”

  Yohanan stared at us. He was, like Paul, without hair except for a slight beard that had turned to frost. He had red hands like pincers, squat legs, and a large belly.

  “We have come from Jerusalem,” said Paul, trying to engage his attention. “We were shipwrecked throughout the winter on an island near Malta. We’re going to Rome now.”

  Yohanan listened to this summary without apparent interest as Paul kept adding details.

  “Tomorrow is the Sabbath,” Yohanan said, when Paul had finished.

  “I have lost track of the days.”

  “You will come?”

  Paul nodded. “I’m a Pharisee,” he said, “a student of Gamaliel.”

  “Like me.” Yohanan smiled now, for the first time.

  “I remember you,” said Paul. “We sat in the same room. So many years ago.”

  “Did we know each other?”

  “We exchanged a few words.”

  After a long pause, Yohanan said, “I remember your letter. You asked for my assistance in Sicily. But the Christ has not come.”

  “He is here.”

  Yohanan stood, alert. “He is not, sir. God is God, and he has sent no one to speak in his name with authority.”

  “Let me explain,” said Paul. I could see the kindling flare in his mind.

  Yohanan listened with his arms folded across his chest as Paul launched into the story of what happened to him on the Damascus Road, an abbreviated version, less dramatic than usual, although I could appreciate one or two flourishes. “A choir of beautiful young angels with golden wings sang above me,” he said. This choir had unexpectedly become young and beautiful, with golden wings. Not bad, I thought. Even plausible.

  Yohanan said, “The Law is the Law. I don’t care about one Christ or another. They come through my doors at regular intervals. Each of them wags God’s tongue, or claims he does.”

  “You must hear me, my friend. I do not speak lightly. I admire what you have written in the past. But Jesus is God’s voice in our time, and beyond time. He was here before Adam and Abraham. And he will return soon, and remain forever.”

  “What about the Law?”

  “He is the Law.”

  Yohanan told us that he had tired of false prophets.

  “I’m simply an advocate for Jesus,” Paul said, “the anointed one who shows us the way.”

  The lack of force or freshness in this comment worried me. Yet Paul had many devices, and knelt before the rabbi now, a peculiar gesture of obeisance. It was as if by giving in, he knew he could soften the heart of Yohanan. Julius and I exchanged skeptical glances.

  Yohanan said, after a long pause, “I will pray about this, Paul. Come tomorrow.”

  “You should expect me,” Paul said.

  “I shall come, too,” I said.

  So we appeared on the Sabbath as promised.

  “This is Paul, a Pharisee,” Yohanan said to the two dozen men who crowded the room. He turned to Paul: “Will you read from the scroll?”

  This was, as before, the opening Paul sought. He glanced only briefly at the scroll. Seeing a passage from the Torah that was familiar, he chanted the holy scriptures with his eyes closed, his palms lifted to heaven. This gesture of mastery caught their attention, as Paul didn’t simply recite from memory. He embodied the words, the voice of God sounding in his mouth, echoing in his bones. Nobody could doubt this gift of prophecy.

  It was a fine day for Paul. He trembled as he retold the story of Abraham and Isaac, always a favorite. Everyone gasped when, after he finished the recitation, he launched into his own interpretation, telling them that Jesus was Abraham’s son, and that God had sacrificed his own beloved for everyone in the room. “Jesus allowed his father in heaven to break his body. He bled because we bleed. He showed us his trust in God by accepting his own demise, by shedding his rags of flesh, taking on the light itself. After three days he rose, as prophesied, assuming a glorified body. God lifted him into heaven again after forty days. He now sits with the Almighty, and we shall sit beside him. His throne is our throne. You are the Christ.” He pointed to each man in the room. “You! And you! Rise into the kingdom!”

  I could see transformations happening as old men wept and the younger ones jumped to their feet and lifted their hands in the air and called out to God. One fellow, no more than twenty, fell to the floor, speaking in tongues. An elderly man pounded his cane on the wall hard, as if trying to knock God loose from the plaster.

  Paul waited for them to settle, for a wave of silence, then told them how he had tried to murder those who proclaimed Jesus as Lord. He had “dropped the final stone on Stephen, crushed his skull. And the blood pooled around, soaking into the dirt.” He retold the story of the Damascus Road. I had heard this tale a thousand times. But this time, radiant and unexpected details, fresh and full of nuance, emerged.

  “I felt my guts spill into the earth,” Paul said. “I was turned out of this flesh, my soul a burning light. And the fire in me had nothing of me about it, it was God’s holy fire. I sizzled in that conflagration, consumed as within a bonfire that takes everything away, lifts ashes into heaven. Nothing was left of me. Gone, the young man driven by his own pride. Gone, the foolish and overlearned youth. Gone, the lustful and wrathful young man. I became light forever, lost in him. I hid in his mind, the Christ mind. God consumed me whole, swallowed me in his flare. I had been lost. Now I was found.”

  Not a single man in that room refused baptism after that flight of language, not even Yohanan.

  Julius said to me when we returned to the ship, “We have seen God blaze before our eyes.”

  “And we have seen his apostle,” I said.

  * * *

  I almost didn’t dare approach Paul as we boarded the ship, heading to Rome. He seemed to burn inwardly, and would have ignored my inquiries, or rejected any comments I offered with a blank stare.

  “I shall die soon,” he said, stepping beside me on the deck as the ship passed Rhegium, then beat into the harbor at Puteoli, from which Rome lay only a day’s jour
ney by cart. I knelt to pray, thanking God for a safe passage. And Paul knelt beside me, lifting a prayer as well.

  We moved, again, in unison. For a time.

  “This is a holy place,” Paul said, as we disembarked, noting that Virgil was buried nearby, in Cumae, an antique city where the Greeks first made landfall in Italy. At Avernus, a crater lake near Cumae, Aeneas made his fateful descent into the underworld to meet his father.

  Paul surprised me and Julius by reciting a passage from the great Roman poet, and with strong feeling. I had never heard him recite in Latin before, but he seemed possessed by this text.

  “Virgil was an alien, a pagan,” I said.

  Paul shook his head. “No! The voice of God has always spoken through the mouths of poets as well as prophets. Virgil knew Jesus in advance of his coming into the world.” He recited from one of the Eclogues, where the poet proclaims the birth of a male child who would find divinity within himself, holding sway over the cosmos. “Did you imagine the truth that Jesus proclaimed was not present before him?”

  I knew nothing of Virgil or his work, but I accepted this, and Julius seemed quite knowledgeable about this particular poem. He nodded eagerly, quoting verbatim. “The cattle will never fear the young lions,” he said, alluding to a line of verse that, as Paul observed, suggested that the calf and the young lion would rise together, led into glory by a small child.

  That day we traveled to Avernus, a beguiling and violet-tinted lake, a near-perfect circle that quivered in the air, as if suspended. I watched as Paul hovered near what he perceived was the entrance to the underworld itself. It was twilight, and soon Paul’s body dissolved in the dark. Then I felt a shudder of cold, and darkness overwhelmed me. It was the blackest night I had ever experienced, and I went looking for Paul, calling his name. But he was not there.