Different Men
Yesterday, we celebrated the Feast of St. Peter and St. Paul. Two very different characters. St. Paul was intelligent, well written, theologically grounded in Judaism and Greek Logic, and a persecutor of Christianity until he had a Gnostic Experience of the Christ. The First Gnostic, his life changed by a mystic vision. He'd never met Jesus, and so his is the first experience of the Christ we have documented, in such a way. St. Peter was a working man, a fisherman from Galilee, practical, straightforward, not given to philosophizing. A man of his time, a butt for jokes (Jesus did call him a 'rock', after all). He was genuine, loyal, afraid at the end. The practical man looks at death, and sees nothing beyond it. He starts looking after his own skin when the movement seems to die. Yet, in the end, this practical man experiences the impractical. He sees the body gone, sees the Risen Christ, and in a practical way he sets about transforming the world, bringing the ...