“Before I was humiliated, I was like a stone lying in deep mire, and He that is mighty came and, in His mercy, lifted me up, and raised me aloft, and placed me on top of the wall.” St. Patrick

“And as Saul journeyed he came near Damascus, and suddenly there shine around him a light from heaven. ”  Acts 9

When did life begin for you?

The obvious answer would be at our birth.  In one sense that’s true.

But when did your REAL life truly begin?  Maybe it hasn’t.

I’m talking about the genuine, authentic, divine life that you live in God.

Mine began eight years ago in Scotland.  Oh, I had lived a very good life before then, at least for the most part.  But the ten weeks I spent at Iona, Scotland when my previous life had fallen part was truly life-changing, life-giving, life-breathing.  It was my conversion.

I was thinking about this during my recent trip to Scotland, and especially during the three days spent at Iona. That sacred place marks the jumping off point of the new life I now live.  But not only me, but so many others.  During my short time there I thought of how Iona was the starting place for Columba.  And how there wouldn’t have been a Columba had there not been a Patrick before him. And there wouldn’t have been a Patrick had there not been a Saul, who became Paul.  And how there wouldn’t have been a Paul had there not been a Jesus of Nazareth.

We could mark two places for Jesus where He started down the path of His God-ordained path, His baptism in the Jordan and the Wilderness.  They really do go together, don’t they?  In order for one to experience the refreshing, resurrecting, renewing waters of baptism which symbolize new birth into a new life, one must go through a time in the wilderness when one is tried and tested and taken to the edge of the limits.  When one really wonders if it wouldn’t be better to be dead.  And it is then, when one is ready to die, that one’s old false way of living life can be put to death and one can be raised to a new life in Christ.

That’s what happened to Paul on the road to Damascus.  God came to him in the midst of his miserable religious life that he was living under the pretense of being a good person who was keeping God’s law.  Isn’t that the way it is with religion?  It makes us false and phony pharisees?  Christ came to Paul, spoke to Paul, called Paul into his new life, which would require time spent in the wilderness.

That’s also the way it was for St. Patrick.  He had been taken captive and was a slave in Ireland.  It was there, as a tender of his master’s flocks and herds, that God found him and spoke to him, and in turn he embraced God.  Here is part of the account as taken from his Confessions.

“Every day I had to tend sheep, and many times a day I prayed, and the love of God and His fear came to me more and more, and my faith was strengthened.  And my spirit was moved so that in a single day I would say as many as a hundred prayers, and almost as many in the night, and this even when I was staying in the wood and on the mountains.  I used to get up for prayer before daylight, through snow, through frost, through rain, and I felt no harm, and there was no sloth in me—as I now see, because the spirit within me was then fervent.  And there one night I heard in my sleep a voice saying to me: ‘It is well that you fast, soon you will go to your own country.’”

In future blogs I’m going to take a deep dive into Celtic Prayer, beginning with what Patrick says here.  But for now, pay attention to where Patrick was at, and what he was doing.  He was with sheep.  Not in a church, a holy place, or anywhere else that might be connected more closely with conversion.  And he was praying.  A hundred times a day.  And as many at night.  His life was one of prayer, driven no doubt by his desperate circumstances.

New life, true life, begins with conversion.  Conversion is a turning point in one’s life.  And it can be painful, as it is a complete reorientation from one thing towards another.  And it can be very risky, like jumping off a cliff without a net, for it is the forsaking of one path, or way of life, for the purpose of walking or pursuing another.

In religious parlance a conversion may be associated most closely with a mountaintop experience, a spiritual high, or an epiphany of God, perhaps similar to the one Peter, James and John experienced on Mount of Transfiguration. For others, many others, including myself, it requires time in the wilderness.  A desperate time, a dark time, a desert time.  A time that results in an insatiable thirst that can only be slaked by God’s heavenly gifts of grace, love and mercy that fill one with new hope and meaning for life.

So what about you?  What life are you living?  How did, or how might, your new life begin? Perhaps as the result of desperate circumstances and situations in which you were so broken, battered and beat down. Perhaps that is the situation you find yourself in now.  Take heart, you are in good company; that of Patrick, Paul, and so many others who have trod this same path before you.  The grace of God, though unique to Paul and Patrick in their circumstances is not unusual nor limited to only a certain few.  God reaches out  and into the lives of each of us to bring us into that place of His Presence.  And there God speaks to us and reassures us that He is our loving God, and we are His beloved children, the sheep of His pasture, whom He Himself is tending.  There God gives us a new beginning.