BBC Radio 4 2016-01-25

BBC Radio 4 2016-01-25

In the mid 1990s when I lived in Krakow I was brought to a Hasidic graveyard in a village not far from Auschwitz. Had I not been told that it was a graveyard I would never have known as only a few rumps of stone remained. The contrast with a photograph of the same site taken in the mid 1930s could not have been starker. It was packed with tombstones marking generations of family history that an ideology had tried to eradicate.

I have been recalling that visit many times over recent months as I try to comprehend the news coming out of Syria and Iraq. Just last week it was confirmed that the Sixth century monastery of St. Elijah on the outskirts of Mosul, had been levelled. It joins a long list of ancient monuments and places of worship destroyed by ISIS including churches, mosques and world heritage sites. It is an attempt not only to wipe out a people, but the evidence of their history and culture.

This evil challenges each of us, and it also confuses us as to how such hatred in hearts can be defeated.

Paul the apostle, whose conversion we celebrate today in the Christian calendar, shows us how even those who engage in the most horrendous of crimes, can convert to have an open heart. On Paul’s journey to Damascus where he was going to engage in more persecution, he converted from being the persecutor to joining the ranks of the persecuted. Up to that point Paul saw difference as a threat and something to be eradicated. But Jesus' example of suffering and death was so profound for Paul that he converted from the one who gave the stonings to the one who took them, and eventually leading to his own martyrdom.

A troubled conscience is rarely still; it can lead to even more hatred or to a conversion of heart. That applies to all humanity regardless of culture, creed or time. Today, two-thousand years on it is Paul who is remembered and gives inspiration; not his tormentors, they are forgotten.