It is a poignant experience to visit a person who has been very active and has been confined to a wheelchair or to bed as a result of a serious illness or accident. Sportsmen or women, gymnasts, ballerinas or dancers must have to draw on all their resources of character to accept their enforced inactivity and rescue something from the seeming ruins of their lives.

Saul,whom we know better as Paul,experienced a similar, if not so prolonged, catastrophe. Paul was a man bursting with energy and aggression. He pursued with vigour those whom he perceived as enemies of the true religion. His terrifiyng experience brought him to a total halt. He had to be led by hand to a house where he spent some days in darkness and immobility.

Paul emerged from his disaster a changed man. The Jesus who spoke to him on the road stayed with him in his darkness.He was helped, too, by the very people, who, despite his terrible reputation as a persecutor of their religion, received him and helped him in an astonishing show of acceptance.

What a contrast those turbulent days in Paul's life provide for our consideration. He, who was stopped in his tracks with the words of Jesus "why do you persecute me?", ringing in his ears, now joins the believers at the Eucharist in which the same Jesus is perceived as the one whose flesh and blood bring eternal life to those who receive them.