St Paul outside the Walls

This past week, our class ventured forth to the beautiful basilica known as St. Paul outside the Walls. This is the second largest basilica in Rome (second to St. Peter's, of course). Tradition (which, in this case, is nearly unquestioned) holds that St. Paul was beheaded about two miles from where the basilica now stands. After his execution, a Roman Christian by the name of Lucina begged for his remains. She was given permission to take them and she buried them just off the Via Ostiense. Almost immediately, a small monument was erected and the place became a site of veneration and pilgrimage. Once Constantine was emperor, a larger building project was begun. Of course, various raids and fires led to stages of restoration and reconstruction throughout the centuries. But this place is the uncontested resting spot of St. Paul's remains, and has been a constant site of veneration as such for more than 1900 years.

This basilica is a very interesting place to visit, particularly because visitors are struck both by its age and by its identity as a constant and contemporary place of pilgrimage. The Holy Door was redone for the Jubilee year in 2000, with images both ancient and modern, and the main entrance has images done for the Pauline year of 2008-9. One gets a sense of the place not as simply a history lesson, but also as the site of a living faith.

My students and I are reading five of St. Paul's letters this semester. For me, at least, it is a powerful thing to read and discuss his words sitting in the shadow of the basilica built over his bones. We spent much of our time in class this week discussing Paul's letter to the Philippians. Of course, the famous "Christ hymn" (Phil 2:5-11) looms large in this text:

Have among yourselves the same attitude that is also yours in Christ Jesus, Who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God something to be grasped. Rather, he emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, coming in human likeness; and found human in appearance, he humbled himself, becoming obedient to death, even death on a cross. Because of this, God greatly exalted him and bestowed on him the name that is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bend, of those in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.

I wonder if these words sing quite so loudly anywhere in the world as at this spot, built over the bones of the author, who himself died a martyr's death. Of course, the strange answer is that they sing just as well in every spot where a Christian lives a life (or dies a death) that proclaims his or her sharing the mind of Christ, His obedience, His humility.

This is, of course, one of the wonderful gifts of St. Paul to the Church, one that I'm trying to communicate to my students. St. Paul wrote these letters that were originally meant to speak to very particular concerns of very particular communities of Christians. And yet, somehow (divine inspiration?!), he offered words that speak of Christian faith and to Christian communities in ways that seem not to be bound (for the most part) by the particularities of time and place.