On the road to Damascus

No, I’m not talking about the target of the neocons’ latest interventionist fantasy.

I’m talking about the St. Paul Moment. The Great Aha! Turning points and watershed occurrences in our lives.

For the last three days the Damascus phrase has been banging around inside my head, telling me there’s a blog entry or article to be written. But whatever’s doing the banging hasn’t been kind enough to tell me exactly what brilliant point I’m supposed to make.

Sigh. So I find myself once again scribbling something that might turn out embarrassingly idiotic, but really having no choice in the matter.

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I don’t believe the famous “road to Damascus” religious conversion experience at all. I doubt St. Paul would have, either — though being the canny organizer he was he’d have probably found it useful.

The best known account is from Acts in the New Testament. It’s all holy fireworks and razzle-dazzle. Scholars debate what the author intended when he composed Acts. But (begging the pardon of my Christian friends), I’ve long suspected the writer’s whole purpose was to alternatively dazzle the rubes with miracles and terrify them with threats — tactics various flavors of the church specialize in to this day.

All that falling down, hearing the voice of God, and being struck blind stuff. Very theatrical. Perhaps not as impressive as St. Joseph of Cupertino levitating a cross 36 feet into the air. But right up there.

Paul himself, however, didn’t put it so dramatically.

To whatever extent the original road to Damascus experience happened at all, I’d guess it went more like this.

Saul has been a zealous persecutor of Christians. But over time, he’s begun to like some of his victims. Or maybe one of them said something that stuck in his mind and now nags at him. His life sucks. He’s questioning how he’s spending his time. Now he’s gotten this commission to go from Jerusalem to Damascus to capture more Christians — something he would have loved doing a year earlier, but that now strikes him as worthless, maybe even downright evil.

But he doesn’t know how to get out of it. His whole reputation, his income, his self-image, are all built around the “profession” of rounding up Christians.

So he’s trudging along with his companions. He knows they expect him to lead them, but in his heart all he wants to do is cry, “NO! Stop!”

He torments himself like this nearly to the gates of Damascus. He tries to force himself to go on. But as soon as he confronts the gate he’ll have to enter to perform his dirty work, he just realizes he can’t, can’t, can’t do it. Not again. Not. One. More. Time.

Does he fall off his donkey, converse with invisible spirits, grovel in the dirt, and go temporarily blind? Probably not — although a case of temporal lobe epilepsy or an emotional breakdown could do that to you.

More likely, he just sits there on his ass (the four-legged kind), looks dumbstruck, then announces to his troops, “Boys, I’m sorry. I can’t do it.”

Then he turns around and rides off on a different course.

Being a natural-born zealot, he eventually throws himself into Christianity with the same intensity he once threw at Christians. He changes his name. It’s a traditional way to signal you’ve changed your life.

And when he says he “saw Jesus” or “heard the voice of God” he means pretty much what most religious people mean when they say it — that they had an insight that they’re reluctant to credit to the ordinary processes of life.

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Of course, guessing what the bible means is an exercise in futility. I have no freaking idea what, if anything, happened to Paul on his road to Damascus. I only know how Aha! moments tend to work in the real world and how people usually come to life-changing points.

You’re not trotting along one day, happy as a pig in garbage, then suddenly — BAM! a voice tells you in plain English to change your ways.

No. You’re laboring along and you’ve hit a wall. You feel like you’re not getting anywhere. You’re discontent. Depressed. Filled with self-loathing or futility. And at the very moment when things seem most dreary, most hopeless, most dead-ended — a way opens.

Aha!

You wake up one morning from a dream, and even though you can’t explain why, the dream has changed you.

Aha!

You’re reading a book, half conscious, when suddenly some phrase leaps off the page at you and shows you the way forward.

Aha!

You bang your head, bang your head, bang your head on a problem. You get nowhere. Finally, you give up, snap a leash on the dog’s collar, and before you’ve taken 50 steps on your walk, the solution presents itself full-blown in your head.

Aha!

You hate your whole wretched life, but no matter how you try, you can’t see a way out. Nothing has ever looked more hopeless. Then … a beam of light falling in the garden, a single conversation with a friend, a sudden unexpected opportunity … and you see a path.

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Aha! moments are intoxicating. Some of us could easily become “aha junkies” — if there were any way to manufacture such insights.

They’re among life’s great — and most important — experiences.

But there are problems with them, too.

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For one thing, a lot of us creative types get off wrong-footed in life because we believe that “inspiration” (another word for the Great Aha) is what drives artistic endeavor.

That’s complete baloney. What drives artistic endeavor is the same thing that drives ditch-digging: hard work and necessity. Inspiration usually follows, not precedes, creative work. Ahas do keep us going. But sitting around waiting for them, doing nothing while fancying ourselves to be potentially the next Lord Byron or Leonardo … well, that’s how we end up flipping burgers or otherwise Not Living Up To Our Potential.

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Another thing about Great Ahas: We really aren’t different people afterwards. Saul was a zealot. Paul was a zealot. And it doesn’t take much looking around to notice that the biggest crusader against anything was likely once the biggest consumer of the same thing (cigarettes, booze). Quite famously, passionate atheists who “see the light” rarely become moderate, half-committed Christians. Equally famously, fiercely devout proselytizing Christians who lose their faith tend to become proselytizing atheists or passionate crusaders against their old faith, not lukewarm agnostics.

We may think we’re different. And we may act a lot differently, but at some point if we’re self-knowing, we’ll encounter our old selves within and may be disappointed.

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Another thing: Life goes on. The greatest Aha! in the world doesn’t eliminate the need for somebody to cook the meals, change the oil in the car, pay the bills, check Facebook (unless your Aha! includes the realization that Facebook is ruining your life), buy Christmas presents for fussy Aunt Gert, calm our teenage daughter’s angst, deal with traffic on I-95, etc. etc.

We get the big glow … then still face the fact that much of life remains grubby and dull and often very difficult.

Life may even get harder if we change in some big way while others around us don’t — and don’t want to.

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Sometimes, too, we want the Great Aha! that changes all of life. We want Magic to take over and lead us by the hand through the entire course of our days. What we get instead — if we’re lucky — is a lifelong series of little ahas.

Each one of them is earned after a period of dreariness and lassitude of the sort that drives some folks to Prozac. Each one comes after painful struggle. For each one, we pay a heavy price.

And each one takes us only so far. We get an aha that leads us to a new job but we soon discover that the new job has boring moments, bad bosses, and that we still have a hard time staying awake at 3:00 p.m. We get an aha that inspires us to sell our possessions and move from Kansas City to Panama City … but we end up taking us with us wherever we go.

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In other words, mythology (both religious and cultural) tells us that Ahas will swoop into our lives and change everything. All we have to do is waltz along and wait for lightning to strike.

In fact Ahas change only some things — and only when we’ve pushed ourselves to some extreme to earn those precious insights. Then, having experienced the brief-but-LSD-like high of the Aha!, we have to work our asses off for years to make something good come of that precious insight.

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I have no idea whether any of the above is useful to anybody, but it’s what “the voice of God” told me to write this week, so there you have it. It may also be the only thing I write this week because as you might figure, I’m butting my head on something. I haven’t gotten to Aha! yet, and may just need to go off and walk in the woods a lot before I get there.