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One of my favourite paintings that I’ve visited several times in Rome is Caravaggio’s Conversion of St Paul, where the painter shows the dramatic moment when Paul, on his way to Damascus to destroy the Christian community, is struck blind by a flash of light. He falls from his horse and hears a voice calling – a voice he then believes to be Christ’s – saying Paul, Paul, why are you persecuting me? When Caravaggio painted his masterpiece in 1600, the Christian world was riven by divisions. These were terrible years of persecution of Christians by Christians, with torture, burnings and executions. It is apt, then, that the feast of the Conversion of St Paul, marked next Thursday, is always the climax of the annual week of Prayer for Christian Unity, when Christians recommit themselves to coming closer together, while well aware of the terrible toll of past divisions. Even 100 years ago, Christian denominations remained suspicious of one another. Then, in the 1960s came a new enthusiasm for dialogue. At one point, there were people in both the Church of England and the Roman Catholic Church who thought full unity of those two Churches was a distinct possibility. Since then, dedicated men and women have worked to bring Churches closer together. There have been efforts to understand different ideas about God, about worship, about priesthood. Yet seemingly intractable differences remain, women priests being but one example. Every so often, the growing warm relations between different Churches grab the headlines. Last year’s visit of Pope Francis, Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby and the Moderator of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland on a peace-making mission to South Sudan together was one such moment. So was the involvement of the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Westminster in the Anglican ceremony of the King’s Coronation – the first Catholic cleric to be involved in the crowning of a British monarch since the Reformation. Yet if you look around, the real progress in unity has not been made by people engaged in heavy theological discourse, or meetings of the most senior clerics. It is happening all around us. The members of different churches who come together to run a food bank, or a homeless shelter, who work alongside one another on prison visiting. It’s found in the many families where one parent belongs to one church, and the other to a different one, who are doing the tricky work of ecumenical dialogue day by day. Christian unity might sound obscure to those who belong to other faiths, or none. But bit by bit, it has made a difference – and something that can really be called a grassroots transformation. Maybe there’s a lesson in that for us all.