During the week January 18 – 25, the Church, the Living Body of Christ prays with focus and energy for Christian Unity. That week’s prayer will conclude with the celebration of the Conversion of St. Paul. Not only did St. Paul make the transition in his own personal life from being the most widely known and feared persecutor of the followers of Jesus. He also had a major role, following his own conversion, in helping the earliest believers, gathered around the Apostles, to understand that Jesus was not just the Messiah of Jewish expectations. Jesus was the Savior of all, and he would become the greatest of the early Apostles to the Gentiles. St. Paul’s insistence on the universal reach of the mission and power of Jesus, and so of the Church, went against the grain. Like every other element of life, society and culture of their day, religious belief and religious practice were generally experienced as another way of seeing life as “them vs. us.” While there were numerous instances in the life and ministry of Jesus in which he reached out to or welcomed the outreach by those who were “other,” the early Church struggled with the notion that Gentiles could claim and be claimed by Christ without embracing the practices of Judaism first. And we know that through historical incidences and developments even Christianity itself grew to see more “them than us.” St. Paul said it, and Our Lord says it - “they are us!” We seek to understand what hinders or divides us. We seek the Lord in common prayer, in common action of service. We seek the Lord, of us all. “I, then, a prisoner for the Lord, urge you to live in a manner worthy of the call you have received$striving to preserve the unity of the spirit through the bond of peace; one body and one Spirit, as you were also called to the one hope of our call; one Lord, one faith, one baptism; one God and Father of all, who is over all and through all and in all.” Ephesians 4: 1-6 Fr. Tom