St. Paul’s Conversion, and Our Own

Today is the Feast of the Conversion of Saint Paul. Paul is a conflicting figure for many feminist women of faith because his letters have often been used to reinforce gender roles and stereotypes. Be that as it may, today I want to consider what Paul’s conversion story has to offer women fighting for ordination. 

Paul’s conversion story goes something like this: Paul is absolutely killing it at being a persecutor of the early Christ followers. He’s zealous, following the ancestral law to a ‘t’, and imprisoning countless followers of “the way.” Then, one day, he’s traveling along the road to Damascus with his compatriots when he is struck blind by a great light and told that this is done by the one whom he is persecuting, Jesus. He then is taken, still blind, to a man named Ananias who is ordered by God to restore Paul’s sight in the name of Christ. After regaining his sight, Paul is baptized and becomes one of the early church’s most dedicated missionaries and profuse letter writers. 

I would like to highlight three things about Paul’s conversion story that may resonate with the women’s ordination movement:

(1) Paul isn’t who anyone expected to be the mouthpiece of Christ. While women may not be killing or imprisoning modern-day Catholics, they are the last people the institutional church expects to be called to ministry. This didn’t stop God from calling Paul, though, and it hasn’t stopped God from calling woman after woman to lead and share Divine Love with the world. 

(2) Paul himself is confused about being chosen to be Christ’s mouthpiece. He is asked to make a 180 on his views of Jesus and those who follow him. This kind of perspective shift is hard work. Paul had to completely re-envision who he was in relation to himself, to others, and to God. This is an accessible feeling for women finding themselves called to ordained life. The church has made no space for this kind of experience and so when it happens it can be bewildering. Like Paul, women called to ordination have to re-envision who they are internally, how this shifts the way others view them, and how God views them and then they have to make the scary choice to act on this. The fact that this hard work got done with Paul and continues to be done with women around the world is evidence of the Spirit at work. It’s just too hard to do alone.

(3) In spite of arguably justified suspicion on the part of Peter and the other apostles, Paul does what he knows God has called him to do and it changes the shape of the world. Paul claims apostleship for himself despite not being among the twelve during Jesus’ life. This opens a whole new meaning for the word apostle to be defined as any who have encountered the risen Christ in any of Christ’s many forms. Women are doing this now. They are claiming apostleship for themselves and doing the ministries God has called them to do in the here and now. They are bringing the sacraments to those hurting at the edges of the church both physically as in the case of remote regions and emotionally as in the case of those unable to come to terms with what they see or have experienced at the hands of the institutional church. Like Paul, women must chase their calling through the suspicion and doubt of those around them. And they do. And it is changing the world. 

May this feast day of the conversion of St. Paul bring about conversion in the larger church, that it may recognize the movement of the Spirit in women around the world. Let the scales of self-doubt and internalized sexism fall from the eyes of women everywhere as they rise to take their place as full participants in the beautiful, sacramental life of God.

Sarah Fariash, a recent graduate of the M.Div program at the Jesuit School of Theology in Berkeley, lives in the Bay Area with her husband and three cats, all of whom happily listen to her frequent rants against the patriarchy.