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The Catholic Church has recognized over ten thousand saints. Most people couldn't name five. Everyday Saints tells the real stories — not the stained-glass versions. Every week, host John O'Connor sits down with the life of one saint, told in plain language for regular people with real jobs, real doubts, and real lives. No theology degree required. Just honest stories about flawed, complicated humans who somehow became extraordinary. Whether you're a lifelong Catholic, a curious skeptic, or somewhere in between — pull up a chair. These stories are worth knowing.
The road to Damascus is dry and hot under the
midday sun. A man is walking it with a group
of companions or riding the account stone specify.
Moving north from Jerusalem toward Damascus,
the great city of Syria. He has papers in his
hand, official papers issued by the high priest
authorizing him to enter the synagogues of
Damascus, identify any followers of Jesus he
finds there and bring them back to Jerusalem
in chains. He has done this before, and he
is good at it. And then, without warning, a
light flashes from the sky, not a gradual brightening,
a sudden, total, blinding light that drops him
to the ground. And a voice says, Saul, Saul,
why are you persecuting me? He says, who are
you, Lord? And that word Lord in the original
Greek is simply a respectful address to a powerful
unknown presence. He is not yet declaring
faith. He has no idea who he is speaking to.
He is a man knocked flat by a blinding light,
asking the only question he can think to ask.
And the voice says, I am Jesus whom you are
persecuting. That is the moment the word Lord
becomes something completely different. He
used it as Sir. He will spend the rest of his
life meaning something else entirely by it.
He lies on the ground, blind, in the dust of
the Damascus road. The companions who were
with him are standing there speechless. They
heard something. The accounts differ on exactly
what they experienced, but the man lying in
the road heard a voice that knew his name.
He will be blind for three days. He will not
eat or drink. He will sit in a house on a street
in Damascus and wait for whatever comes next.
What comes next will change the world.
Hi, my name is John O'Connor and this is Everyday
Saints. If you are new here, welcome to our
porch. Stick around and if this connects with
you, subscribe so you don't miss next week.
We drop a new saint every Thursday. Before we
get into today's episode, I want to take a
quick moment to acknowledge something. Last
weekend was the 4th of July. And not just any
4th of July, the 250th birthday of the United
States of America. I am actually up in South
Dakota on a work trip when this episode airs,
so I recorded this a week early, but I did
not want to let that milestone go without saying
something. To every American listener, and
80 % of you are Americans, I want you to know
I appreciate you. I appreciate all of you.
I hope you had a fantastic holiday weekend.
I hope you were with the people you love doing
something that felt like freedom, which, as
it turns out, is not a bad way to introduce
today's story. Because the man we are talking
about this week spent 30 years of his life
traveling the known world at enormous personal
cost. Beaten, imprisoned, shipwrecked. Because
he believed something was worth being free
for. 250 years ago, a group of people decided
the same thing was worth it. Happy July 4th.
Okay. This week, we are telling the story of
a known saint, one of the most recognizable
names in all of Christianity. A man whose letters
make up roughly half the New Testament. A man
who founded churches across the known world
on foot. A man whose thinking has shaped Western
civilization in ways most people have never
traced back to their source. But before all
of that, he was the most dangerous enemy the
early church had. His name was Saul of Tarsus,
and we know him as Saint Paul. To understand
what happened on that road, you have to understand
who was walking it. Saul was born in the city
of Tarsus, in what is now southern Turkey, one
of the most important commercial hubs in the
Roman Empire. He was Jewish, from a respected
family. He was also a Roman citizen by birth.
which was rare and valuable. See, Roman citizenship
came with legal protections and rights that
most people living under Roman rule simply did
not have. It was, in practical terms, like
being born with a passport that opened doors
most people couldn't get through. He was a
Pharisee. If you have heard that word and never
been quite sure what it meant, The Pharisees
were the most serious and most rigorous sect
within 1st century Judaism. Think of them
as the scholars, the keepers of the law, the
ones who took every detail of their faith with
complete seriousness and expected everyone
else to do the same. Saul was not casual Pharisee.
He trained in Jerusalem under one of the most
respected teachers in the Jewish world. the
equivalent of getting your doctorate from the
most prestigious institution in the country.
He was brilliant, disciplined, and by his own
later account, more zealous for his faith than
almost anyone around him. Picture what that
looked like practically. A young man of fierce
intelligence and genuine deep religious conviction,
absolutely certain that he understood what
God required, and absolutely certain that followers
of Jesus were a dangerous heresy that needed
to be stopped. Here is why he felt that way
and why it actually made sense from where he
stood. The early followers of Jesus were claiming
something that, to a devout Jew, was almost
unthinkable. They were saying that a carpenter
from Galilee who had been publicly executed,
crucified the most shameful death the Roman
Empire could administer was the promised Messiah,
the one Israel had been waiting for, the Son
of God, and that he had risen from the dead.
If that claim was true, it changed everything.
If it was false, and Saul was absolutely certain
it was false, it was blasphemy of the worst
kind, a lie about God dressed up as the most
important thing that had ever happened. And
Saul, believed it was his religious duty to
stop it. So he did something about it. He was
present the day a man named Stephen was killed.
Stephen was one of the early followers of Jesus,
dragged before the religious authorities in
Jerusalem, accused of blasphemy and condemned.
The men who carried out the execution laid
their outer cloaks at Saul's feet so he could
watch without getting his hands dirty. He didn't
throw a single stone. He just stood there and
approved. And then he went further. He went
house to house through Jerusalem, dragging out
men and women who followed Jesus and throwing
them into prison. He was not a bystander to
the persecution of the early church. He was
its engine. He was so effective and so committed
that the high priest, the top religious authority
in Jerusalem, gave him official written authorization
to travel north to the city of Damascus and
do the same thing there. That is who was walking
the Damascus road. A man who was actively,
intelligently, wholeheartedly certain he was
doing God's will by destroying what would eventually
become the largest religion in human history.
And God chose him anyway. He was led into Damascus
by his own hand, the most feared persecutor
of the early church, helpless, blind, being
guided through the streets like a child. He
was brought to the house of a man named Judas
on a street called Strait, a street that still
exists in Damascus today, one of the oldest
continuously inhabited streets in the world.
And there Saul sat for three days, blind, not
eating. not drinking, praying. Three days.
I think those three days deserve more attention
than they usually get because what was happening
in that house, in that darkness, in that silence
was a demolition. Everything Saul had been
concerned about for his entire life was gone,
dismantled in a single moment on a dirt road.
And now he was sitting in the dark trying to
figure out what was left. He had been certain
Jesus was a fraud. He had been certain the
Christians were blasphemers. He had been certain
that his persecution of them was righteous.
Every single one of those certainties had been
demolished on a dirt road outside Damascus
in a moment he could not explain, could not
rationalize, and could not walk back from.
He lay in that house for three days, in the
dark, and The person who walked out of it
was not the same person who had walked in. Meanwhile,
across the city, a disciple named Ananias
was having his own difficult experience. Jesus
appeared to Ananias in a vision and told him
to go to the house of Judas, find the man called
Saul, and lay hands on him to restore his sight.
Ananias' response is one of the most understandable
moments in the story. He essentially says,
Lord, I have heard about this man. I know what
he has done in Jerusalem. I know why he came
to Damascus. And you want me to go find him?
And Jesus says, yes, he is my chosen instrument.
Ananias went, he found Saul. He laid his hands
on him and said, Brother Saul, the Lord Jesus
who appeared to you on the road has sent me
so that you may see again and be filled with
the Holy Spirit. He could see again. He got
up and was baptized. He ate. He regained his
strength. And then he went straight to the synagogues
of Damascus, the same synagogues he had arrived
with arrest warrants to visit, and began preaching
that Jesus was the Son of God. The people who
heard him were understandably confused. Is this
not the man, they said, who came here to arrest
the followers of Jesus? What is happening? What
was happening was this. The most effective
persecutor of the early church had just become
its most effective evangelist, and nobody on
either side was quite ready for that. Before
we go any further, I want to address something
you may have already noticed, or maybe about
to notice. Up to this point, I have been calling
him Saul. From here on, I am going to call him
Paul, and I want to explain why, because it
is not what most people think. He was not given
the name Paul on the Damascus road. Jesus did
not rename him the way he renamed Simon as Peter.
Saul already had both names his entire life.
Saul was his Jewish name. Paul was his Roman
name. Having two names like this was completely
normal for a Jewish-Roman citizen of this era.
The reason the name shifts here is simply that
his story is about to shift. He is moving from
the Jewish world of Jerusalem into a broader
Roman and Greek world, and in that world, Paul
is the name that traveled better. So, that
is what we will call him from this point forward.
Same man, different road. Here's the part of
Paul's story that most retellings skip over,
and I think it's one of the most humanly honest
parts. When Paul tried to join the disciples
in Jerusalem after his conversion, they were
afraid of him. Of course they were. These were
people who had watched their friends and family
members dragged from their homes by this man,
who had fled Jerusalem because of him, who
knew his reputation for breathing out murderous
threats against the Lord's disciples. That's
the actual phrase the scripture uses. Breathing
out murderous threats. That is who he had been
weeks or months earlier. And now he shows up
saying he has converted? It took a man named
Barnabas, one of the early disciples, known
for his generosity and his willingness to vouch
for people, to stand up for Paul and explain
what had happened on the road. Barnabas brought
Paul to the apostles. He told them the story.
He made the case. Slowly, painfully, Paul began
to earn the trust of the community he had been
trying to destroy. I think about what that
must have felt like. To know what you had done.
To walk into rooms where the people looked
at you with fear, legitimate fear, earned fear,
fear you had personally given them every reason
to have. To know that no matter what you said,
the only way to demonstrate that you had changed
was to change, visibly, consistently, over time,
in the places where it was hardest. Paul did
not seem to shrink from it. He seems, if anything,
to have leaned into this discomfort with the
same energy he had brought to everything else
in his life. Within days of his baptism, He
was already arguing in synagogues that Jesus
was the Christ. People tried to kill him almost
immediately. They would keep trying for the
rest of his life. What Paul did in the 30 years
after Damascus is, by any historical measure,
extraordinary. He traveled constantly, by foot,
by ship, through weather and terrain that would
challenge a fit young man. And Paul was not
young. and was not, by all accounts, physically
impressive. He describes himself in his letters
as unimpressive in person and his bodily presence
is weak. He suffered from some kind of chronic
physical ailment that he called a thorn in the
flesh and he prayed repeatedly to be healed
of and never was. But he pressed forward anyway.
He was beaten with rods three times. He was
whipped with 39 lashes, five times. He was
shipwrecked, three times, once spending a
night and a day floating in open ocean. He was
stoned and left for dead. He was imprisoned
multiple times. He was in danger from rivers,
from bandits, from his own people, from the
Gentiles, in cities, in the wilderness, at sea.
But he kept going. He planted churches across
the Mediterranean world, such as in Galatia,
in Philippi, in Thessalonica, in Corinth, in
Ephesus, in Rome. In cities where nobody had
heard of Jesus, Paul arrived with nothing,
no money, no political connections, no army,
no institutional support, and left with a community
of believers who would sustain and grow for
centuries. He wrote. His letters to the Romans,
to the Corinthians, to the Galatians, to the
Thessalonians, to others, are among the oldest
documents in the New Testament, written within
20 years of the resurrection. They wrestle
directly and honestly with what it means to
live as a follower of Jesus in a world that
does not share that commitment. They are pastoral
and theological and personal and occasionally
very funny in a sharp, exasperated way. He wrote,
I can do all things through Christ who strengthens
me. He wrote, for I am convinced that neither
death nor life, neither angels nor demons,
neither the present nor the future, nor any
powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything
else in all creation, will be able to separate
us from the love of God. He wrote these things
from prison. He was beheaded in Rome. probably
around 64 or 65 AD under the Emperor Nero.
He was approximately 60 years old. He had been
a follower of Jesus for roughly 30 years, which
is about the same length of time he had spent
not being one. He died on the same road, in
the same city, within a few years of the same
emperor's persecution that killed Peter, who
was our saint from episode 1. The man who had
once watched Christians die, died as one of
them, with, as far as the record suggests, the
same absolute conviction he had brought to
everything else in his life. All right, back
on the porch. The thing about Paul's story
that I find most striking, and personally uncomfortable
if I'm going to be honest, is not the Damascus
Road. It's what came after it. It's the 30 years.
Paul could have had the Damascus Road experience
and then just retreated, gone quiet, decided
that his job was simply to stop doing harm
and live humbly and privately and just not make
too much noise about any of it. mean, given
the damage he had caused, that would have been
understandable, maybe even reasonable. But
he didn't do that. He went to the synagogue
the same week. He went to Jerusalem. and made
himself known. He traveled for 30 years through
beatings and shipwrecks and prisons and attempted
murders, building something in city after city
after city. He seemed to understand that the
same energy, the same intelligence, and the
same relentless forward motion that had made
him so effective as a persecutor, those were
not bad things in themselves. They were the
tools. What changed was what he used them for.
I think a lot of us look at our own histories,
the versions of ourselves we're not proud of,
the harm we've caused, the people we've hurt,
the ways we used our energy and intelligence
and drive in directions we now regret. And
we conclude that the right response is to become
smaller, to hold back. to cautious and quiet
and careful in ways we weren't before. Paul
is not telling you that your past doesn't matter.
He carried his past visibly. He mentions his
persecution of the church in multiple letters,
never hiding from it. But he is telling you
something specific about what to do with the
energy you have, not to suppress it, but to
redirect it. The same fire just different direction.
I will be honest, I've been sitting with that
question for myself since I started researching
this episode. There are things I have been cautious
with, held back from, dialed down, because
of a version of myself I was not proud of. And
Paul is asking me, and maybe asking you, whether
caution is actually the right response. Or whether
the right response, is to take that same energy
and point it somewhere it can actually do something.
So, the practical challenge this week. Think
about one quality in yourself that you have
used badly in the past, or that you have been
suppressing out of guilt, and ask what it would
look like to redirect it. Not to perform redemption
publicly, just to ask honestly and privately,
what could this become? if I pointed it somewhere
true. And now it is time for the closing prayer.
Lord, thank you for Paul. Thank you that you
stopped a man on a road and asked him a question
instead of writing him off. Thank you that
you chose as your instrument someone who had
done real and serious harm and then used the
same qualities that made him so dangerous. builds
something that is still standing 2,000 years
later. For everyone listening who is carrying
the weight of a past they are not proud of,
remind them of Paul on the road. Remind them
that the question isn't whether you have done
damage. The question is, what you do with the
rest of the road. And for anyone who is afraid
to trust someone who says they have changed,
give them the wisdom of Barnabas. the courage
to vouch for someone who deserves a second look.
We love you, even when the road knocks us
flat. Amen. One more thing before we go. Paul
is the patron saint of missionaries, evangelists,
writers, and journalists, which fits, given
that he essentially invented the Christian
letter as a literary form. He is also the patron
saint of tent makers, which is his actual trade.
the skill he used to support himself financially
while he planted churches across the Mediterranean.
He made tents. He changed the world. He shares
his feast day with Peter, June 29th, which
feels right. The fishermen who denied Jesus
three times and the zealot who hunted Christians
for a living together on the same day. Two men
who failed in ways that should have disqualified
them. Two men who became the foundation of everything
that came after. His conversion on the road
to Damascus is also celebrated separately on
January 25th, a feast day that goes back to
the earliest centuries of the Church. The day
a man fell off his horse, heard his name called,
and never looked back. Well, that is episode
9 of Everyday Saints. If Paul's story hits
you somewhere, share it. One person, someone
who might need to hear that the same energy
that drove them in the wrong direction can be
redirected. That the fire itself is not the
problem. Leave a review if you have a minute.
It genuinely helps more people find the show.
Next week, we go back to looking in places nobody
else looks. Someone history almost completely
forgot. A story from a world most people know
nothing about and a courage that is going to
stay with you. I'm John O'Connor. Thanks for
sitting on the porch with us. See you next
week.