25/01/2018: The Road to Damascus

‘For none of us lives for ourselves alone, and none of us dies for ourselves alone’.

 In 2011, an evangelical Christian youth-worker called Symon Hill came out of the closet. Having previously been viciously homophobic, counselling teenagers to reject their queer feelings and voting against the ordination of ‘practising homosexuals’, he finally came to terms with his own bisexuality, and embarked upon a 160-mile walk of repentance from Birmingham to London Pride. It didn’t undo the harm that he had caused, but as a gestures go, it was an honest one.

Rewind twenty centuries; today is the feast of the conversion of Saint Paul. Before his conversion, Paul was known as Saul: he was called a 'zealot' and 'a Pharisee of Pharisees', and he 'intensely persecuted' the early Christians. In the Acts of the Apostles, he even participates in the stoning of St Stephen. The story of his conversion sees him on the road to Damascus from Jerusalem, with the intention of finding and arresting the Apostles. He is struck down by the apparition of Christ. Suddenly blind, he abstains from food and drink for three days, and—to add insult to injury—is led by the hand to the house of none other than Judas. He only recovers when God sends Ananias to lay redemptive hands upon him. The scales fall from his eyes, he changes his name from Saul to Paul, and he is baptised.

Paul's Epistles have some dodgy moments, and I feel profoundly ambivalent about him at times. He provides so much fodder for conservative fundamentalists, and no matter how much liberal wriggling we do, his writing is eminently readable through lenses of misogyny, homophobia, and judgmentalism towards alcoholics. But today’s reading is really Paul at his best. Elevating togetherness, dare I say allyship, above zeal and individualism, he absolutely insists that 'none of us lives for ourselves alone, and none of us dies for ourselves alone'. The scales fell from Paul’s eyes when he renounced his persecutory ways, and I believe that the scales fell from Symon Hill’s eyes when he came out of the closet that day; his walk of repentance was very much a road to Damascus. 

The conversion of St Paul falls at the end of the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity, and Paul’s message is a powerful one in such a context: 'let us stop passing judgement on one another' he writes later in Romans, 'make up your mind not to put any stumbling block or obstacle in the way of a brother or sister'. But this message comes with a warning: allyship can be radical; bland tolerance is not. Symon Hill is eager to emphasise this, and writes the following: 

'pro-equality Christians have often failed to speak up out of a misplaced desire for unity. We have been too ready to accept crumbs from the anti-equality table [….] I believe passionately that it is important to approach our opponents with love and to accept that we can learn from each other however much we disagree. But love involves a commitment to justice. There are times when we must choose between the idol of unity and the God of love'.

While it’s great being queer and I would highly recommend it, you don’t need to come out of the closet like Symon Hill to shed the scales from your eyes: all it takes is the blunt recognition, to quote Paul one last time, that 'none of us lives for ourselves alone, and none of us dies for ourselves alone'. The scales before our eyes are not borne of mundane disagreement, they are borne of misunderstanding, fear of, and ultimately hatred of the Other. That is why, if you resist the idol of unity in the name of allyship with the oppressed, you choose the God of love.