Hope In Crisis: Paul Hugs His Cactus

For this week’s reflection I will be taking a look at the first part of the hug your cactus journey, which is to not give up, and even find hope when life is not working due to a self-imposed crisis.  We will be doing this through the life of the zealous Apostle Paul who is first introduce to us as the equally Saul, the equally zealous Pharisee and persecutor of the church.  The cactus hugging journey at its spiritual core is a response to the invitation from Jesus that was first offered to twelve of his closest followers.   “Then Jesus told his disciples, ‘If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.’”^[1]  Cactus hugging then involves surrendering the harmful parts of self to gain a fuller sense of self in Christ.   Therefore, embarking on this journey of self-discovery includes willingness to deny, or as it is sometimes referred to “die to” self and follow Jesus.  Psychologically this same invitation can be expressed as denying or dying to “ego.”  In psychoanalysis the ego is understood as, “the part of a person’s mind that tries to match the hidden desires (= wishes) of the id (= part of the unconscious mind) with the demands of the real world.”^[2]  This attempt to match one’s hidden desires with the many demands of the real world often fails and eventually leads to one’s life, or at least a part of one’s life, not working.  However, the story does not have to end there, as a life that is not working can become a life that takes on new meaning.  This includes acknowledging and addressing the personal desires and even the patterns of behavior that are obstacles to one’s life working as it should.  As one denies self, they are able to start to face and deal with the shadow side of the self and start to hug their cactus, the ugly parts of their soul.  

My primary resource for researching Paul was N.T. Wrights work Paul, A Biography.  Wright does a great job of showing young Saul’s zeal which put him in direct conflict with the early followers of Jesus, whom he believes pose a threat to the prophesied reign of God.  It is from this place that Saul enters the first part of his own cactus hugging journey.  If cactus hugging begins with a crisis, few if any have experienced this more famously than Saul did on the road to Damascus, for it even led to him to be referred to as Paul.  The phrase “A road to Damascus experience” to describe a life changing event seems to have become just as well-known as, or even more so than the person who first experienced it.  This incident or crisis clearly had a life-changing impact on Saul as it is narrated by Luke in Acts 9 and described by Paul himself three times in Galatians 1, Acts 24, and Acts 26. 

However, it is important to understand that up to the point at which Saul encountered the risen Jesus on the road to Damascus, he was totally unaware that his life was not working.  In reflecting back on this reality in his letter to the Galatians, Paul comments, “For you have heard of my former life in Judaism, how I persecuted the church of God violently and tried to destroy it.  And I was advancing in Judaism beyond many of my own age among my people, so extremely zealous was I for the traditions of my fathers.”^[3]  Since Saul did not realize it at the time, his life was not working, and like many people it took a crisis for him to realize it.  This is an important insight for cactus hugging, few are self-aware enough to realize on their own that their life is not working and that they are responsible for their own crisis.  It generally takes the intervention of another person and/or a traumatic life event to make one aware. 

In Paul’s own account from Galatians, we see that it was fourteen years between this encounter and when Paul is commissioned to start his missionary work to the Gentiles.  This is another important reality of the cactus hugging journey.  One does not confront the ugly parts of their soul and just then have a life of new meaning overnight.  It takes time to face the ego, shadow, false sense of self; and then learn to integrate in a healthy way into a more holistic sense of self way.  Saul/Paul in those 14 years went to Arabia, even possibly Mt. Sinai to sort through how things had gone so horribly wrong; how his zeal had led him astray.   He experienced a true life crisis which can be described as, “When therefore something shakes someone to the very core, so that that person emerges from the cataclysm in some ways the same but in other ways radically different.”^[4]  This is an important point in understanding the cactus metaphor.  Despite the transformative nature of Saul’s encounter with Jesus, the qualities that made up the person of Saul up to this point, especially his zeal continued in Paul after. 

In all of this Paul’s loyalty to God of Israel remained firm, though redirected in Jesus, as did his hope.  Throughout his writings Paul lifts up hope, often tied closely with faith and love, as one of the primary virtues or ideas for the follower of Jesus.  To Paul, hope was tied to a very specific idea, the resurrection.  Paul had come to believe that the ultimate source of hope for himself and others was found in the glory of God as revealed in the promised resurrection of the dead.  In understanding Paul as an example of cactus hugging this hope is also understood in the context of suffering.   For the person on the cactus hugging journey, rejoicing while not losing hope is essential to moving on in life from the place of their not working.  There is going to be suffering and challenging times ahead, but Paul understood that rejoicing in the suffering will produce a hope that does not disappoint.  “Not only that, but we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not put us to shame.”^[5]  Facing the cactus or the ugly part of the soul can easily put anyone to shame, yet remaining in hope actually does the opposite; it removes shame.  Paul understood that this does not happen easily or quickly, but over time, so he emphasized a sequence of ideas that build upon each other; suffering to endurance to character to hope.  In this sequence, “Hope returns in a circle upon itself. Faith tested and approved, produces hope in enhancing and confirming it.  As Saul the zealous persecutor became Paul the zealous Apostle, he no doubt suffered as he faced the parts of his life that weren’t working.  Through it all he never lost hope, a hope based on Jesus the promised resurrection of the dead.  So the question we all ask ourselves, especially in the face of a crisis of our own making, where do we find our hope?       

Here is a You Tube video that shares this content in a different format:

[1] Matt. 16:24-25, ESV.

[2] Cambridge Dictionary, “ego,” dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/ego, accessed August 15, 2022.

[3] Gal. 1:13–14, ESV.

[4] N.T. Wright, Paul: A Biography (San Francisco: Harper One, 2018), 36.

[5] Rom. 5:3-5, ESV.