Just a couple of hundred words about yesterday’s meeting. Father Dominic gave a lecture about St. Paul to an audience of 8-9 people. We were in the dining room. Everybody was seated around an oval-shaped table. It was dark outside, and the lamps hanging from the ceiling almost only illuminated the table, leaving everything else and everybody wrapped in the greyness of the shadows. But the teas, coffees and chocolate cakes were in clear view of the hungry students and young adults. And they became quickly devoured.
But more food arrived. Father Dominic kindly shared the free baguettes that he got from the university’s canteen with the students. Of course, with the thoughts of getting myself free food in my mind, I tried to interrogate him about his contacts on the inside of the university. But he just smiled to himself, brushed aside my questions and contentedly started the lecture. I fully sympathized with him. Knowledge is power. Or in this case, free baquettes.
The lecture (which is not a lecture in the sense of a boring, sleep-inducing and monological speech from your university-professor, but a lecture in the sense of an interesting, interactive and dialogical discussion between a Bible-knower and a bunch of Bible-want-to-knowers) started with each person telling one thing that they knew about St. Paul. “He was blind at one time,” I quickly announced, and thereby made sure that no other person said that before me. Because that was about the only thing I knew about him…
The other contributed with better (and sometimes weirder) knowledge: “His original name was Saulus”, “He first persecuted the christians”, “He was called the Apostle to the Gentiles”, “He was a tentmaker”, “His head bounced three times on the ground when he was decapitated, and on those places churches were built”.
But more importantly, he believed in God and in Christ, and turned away from his path of persecuting and joined the people who he once persecuted – he became a christian. And even more notably, his interpretation and his view of the Holy Spirit from a different and refreshing angle, his wisdom and his blessed mind, was an immensely valuable contribution to the Church and its formation in the earlier years.
There’s a lot to learn about St. Paul. This evening, we had only scratched the surface of this big subject and gotten ourselves an introduction. More will come.
