"Indeed, I myself was convinced that I ought to do many things against the name of Jesus of Nazareth. And that is what I did in Jerusalem… I tried to force them to blaspheme; and since I was so furiously enraged at them, I pursued them even to foreign cities.” -Acts 26:9, 11.
 
This week is known as the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity. Not that you likely have heard much about it, as it has waned in prominence over the last several decades. It is a week of prayerful ecumenical collaboration that was started in 1908, framed by two festivals in the sanctoral calendar (the calendar of saints’ days): the Confession of St. Peter on January 18^th and the Conversion of St. Paul on January 25^th. 
 
I can measure how unaware I have been of the festivals bordering this week by the birth of our youngest child. In my previous diocese, I remember sharing with my bishop Tom Shaw that Kateri’s due date was January 25^thbut that we imagined the baby would arrive earlier. (In fact he did—over a week earlier). 
 
“Ah, a due date on the Conversion of St. Paul,” Tom commented, as if that was an auspicious date. 
 
“What?” I looked at him. I had no idea. “We just figure the baby is likely to arrive earlier than that. A Capricorn.” “
 
“You know the baby’s astrological sign but not its feast day?!” he responded incredulously. 
 
“What can I say? I don’t have the sanctoral calendar memorized.”
 
He clearly did. I chalked it up to his being a monk. (He actually was a monk of the Society of St. John the Evangelist, an Anglican monastic order.)
 
But actually, I should have known. I should have been aware of this date framing the prayer “that we all might be one,” as a primary goal for Christians who, to our shame, are so good at remaining divided from one another and at fostering divisions in the wider world.  
 
Today as I look toward the week’s concluding feast, the Conversion of St. Paul the Apostle, I am struck by a key feature of Paul’s story. His conversion narrative emphasizes how God called him in the midst of his previous life, a life in which he zealously persecuted followers of Jesus. When (a post-resurrection) Jesus calls to him through a bright, blinding light on the road to Damascus, he asks pointedly, “why are you persecuting me?” When Paul would later describe this experience to others-- several times in fact in the Acts of the Apostles, in fact -- he would very consciously acknowledge how wrong his previous actions were. “I tried to force them to blaspheme,” he explains to King Agrippa in the assigned passage from Acts. “I pursued them.” Paul was called from out of his brokenness, his deeply divisive, dehumanizing behavior, to follow the one he previously hated.
 
Now, to be fair, some of Paul’s own writings bear evidence of his ongoing brokenness. His rhetoric can inspire and infuriate. I have passages of his letters that I love and others than I reject. But one thing is clear: Paul was honest about who he was, transformed by the Christ he had previously scorned. Truly he was a human being touched by the reality of resurrection. That bedrock truth, yoked to the story of his call, always lay at the core of his witness.
 
Today I am appreciating the raw honesty of that witness in a week that is suffused by division and bitter fighting at the highest levels of our government, as the impeachment trial is finally unfolding in the U.S. Senate. It isn’t just the Senate that is profoundly divided. It is the whole country. I was amazed by the wild range of views expressed in this New York Times story about eighty-one people who were interviewed about the impeachment trial.
 
If this is a week in which Christians are called to pray for our own unity, I would invite us to follow Paul’s example in that regard—not just to pray but to repent, to confess where we have gone very, very wrong, to look to the crucified and resurrected one to redeem us, and to move forward together by the authenticity of the grace that changes us.
 
I once was lost but now I’m found, was blind but now I see.
 
What justice, what healing, what unity might be possible in this world if more people were able to turn from their evil – their posturing, manipulation, and cover-ups, their dishonesty, self-absorption, entitlement, and obsession with power, their demeaning of other human beings and of the earth itself? What if more people allowed ourselves to turn, to be turned, with honesty, with what the Book of Common Prayer calls “true repentance”? What if we opened ourselves to the transformative power of grace? 
 
If this shades a bit toward Ash Wednesday a month early, so be it.
 
In this week of Prayer for Christian Unity, in the spirit of the journey of Paul, my prayer is not only for Christians to be made one. It is for our leaders to tell the truth to one another and to us, for them to be changed in the process. My prayer is for all of us to be able to walk forward in this country together, transformed. It is for the grace of God to flow.  

Peace,
 
Cameron