On June 29, 2008, Pope Benedict declared the beginning of the year of St. Paul, encouraging us and pointing us towards this man, whose conversion we hear about today, who while setting out to destroy the church became, instead, her greatest hero and supporter. A man who held such great contempt for the church, yet, would ultimately lay down his life for her and a man who so adamantly hated Christians but would, in the end, become one himself.

It was, in fact, for this reason that Pope Benedict saw in St. Paul not just an amazing example, but one who is easy to imitate. For, as Pope Benedict reminded when declaring this “Pauline Year,” St. Paul was not a good speaker and lacked any oratory skills, and his body was weak and frail. Therefore, as the Pope said: “The extraordinary apostolic results that he was able to achieve cannot, therefore, be attributed to brilliant rhetoric or refined apologetic and missionary strategies.” No, rather, as the Pope continues: “The success of his apostolate depended above all on his personal involvement in proclaiming the Gospel with total dedication to Christ; a dedication that feared neither risk, difficulty nor persecution.”

In other words, God chose an ordinary man, with nothing extraordinary, and more faults and lack of gifts than many others, and the only thing that made him different was his desire, sometimes to an extreme degree, to fully follow Christ, despite the consequences or difficulties that that entailed. And, this would never have happened without that conversion, without being knocked to the ground and having his eyes first closed in order for them to be opened for the first time in his life.

That is why we are asked to look to him as an example, not just because of the life he lived, a life we are called to imitate, since his was an imitation of Christ, but, more so, because he reminds us that all of us have come from someplace else; that all of us have had to experience a conversion to a greater or lesser degree.

For some of us, we were always raised Catholic, lived it, loved it, and never strayed, for others we questioned, we left, we explored and like a prodigal, we returned, and still for others Catholicism was never appealing, we were content with something else, until one day.

That one day, that all of us have had, when everything changed, when we, ourselves, whether die-hard Catholic, lapsed Catholic, or non-Catholic were knocked off our feet and overwhelmed by the reality of God. That is conversion, true conversion, and we know it because it is extreme, we don’t fall to our feet, we don’t suddenly come to a realization, we are knocked down, overwhelmed, and enveloped by a reality that is greater than we could possibly imagine or fathom.

And, it changes us, we are different, like St. Paul the scales fall and we see in a new way, we see as if we have never seen before.

And, that is why our desire, like St. Paul, should be to make each day each moment a new opportunity to grow in that conversion, or, as St. Josemaria Escriva beautifully puts it: “To reform. Every day a little. This has to be your constant task if you really want to become a saint.”

Because St. Paul’s conversion teaches us about our own, we don’t need special skills and talents, though they are great to have, we don’t need to be great, we don’t need to be powerful, we don’t need to be popular, we need only to be one thing, committed to Christ, with an undying dedication that knows no risk or fear. For, as St. Josemaria Ecriva has also said, and with whom I leave you with today: “Conversion is the matter of a moment. Sanctification is the work of a lifetime.”