Main news for 18 November 2015

A well-known truth says: everything is known by comparison. It is not surprising that it applies to Christian life too. But in what sense? Of course, every time a person experiences conversion, and not necessarily to God or to Christ, but to any new faith for him, even a philosophical one, his first reaction as a new convert is a revaluation of all values, often a very radical one. But with time, as a rule, such a novice becomes less radical, and the less so the more he ceases to be a novice; sometimes, however, it happens otherwise, but this should probably already be considered an anomaly of spiritual development. With Paul, however, everything is evidently different: his revaluation proved not only radical but very stable, and he confirms throughout his whole Christian life the attitude he expresses here toward all his former knowledge. What is the matter here? Paul cannot be suspected of spiritual immaturity in any way. Evidently the matter is something else. One could of course also say that a person who has experienced conversion to God and stepped onto the path of righteousness often revalues his whole former life once and for all, especially if his life was sinful and incompatible with righteousness. But this cannot be said of Paul either: he chose God and the path of righteousness much earlier than the meeting on the Damascus road. What does he mean? Perhaps to understand Paul one must experience what he experienced: the overwhelming experience of the reality of the risen Christ and of the Kingdom that entered the world with Him. Against such a background, everything former really becomes something of little significance or entirely insignificant. And the point here is not that in the Kingdom no human knowledge or human experience is needed. The point is rather the quality of this knowledge and experience. For all our experience by definition turns out to be experience of the untransfigured world. And such experience is inevitably limited. And like everything belonging to the untransfigured order of things, in the Kingdom it must change, be melted down, be transfigured. But this will become possible only if we do not cling to our knowledge and experience in their former, old quality. The most important thing here is to understand that in such quality it is no more fit for the Kingdom than trash is for a household. Paul understood this, refusing what had previously formed the basis of his life, religious and intellectual. In return he received much more: the living experience of the Kingdom, which transfigures a person together with all his knowledge.