David mourned and wept and fasted until evening for Saul and his son Jonathan, because they had fallen by the sword. The Bible doesn’t tell us what would have happened if David had been at the battle. He was Saul’s best general. He had amassed a crack troop of mercenaries. If Saul and David had overcome their antipathy and joined forces could they have turned back the Philistine threat? As a poet once said, “Of all sad words of tongue or pen, the saddest are these, ‘It might have been.'” Looking at history we see all too often how divisions have turned certain tides and how unity can reverse them. The fractious nature of European politics led to the fall of Constantiople in the fifteenth century and the dramatic intervention of Poland led to the saving of Vienna in the seventeenth. We are in a time of division in the Church with lines hardening. If we want to become effective evangelizers we must learn that what we have in common is much more important than what divides us.
