 ‘Disloyalty is essential for a good, free and honest life.’ (Yasmin Alibhai-Brown) I found Yasmin Alibhai-Brown’s claim (above) in her article in The i Paper this week provocative and intriguing. As a Muslim woman, she argues convincingly (in the context of grooming gangs) that ‘loyalties demanded by families, communities, movements, political parties and nations make us conform and acquiesce. Without dissent, we become slaves or collaborators.’ Yasmin's makes a courageous call to stand up and to speak out against the evil of perpetrators, where silence could be taken as cowardice or collusion. I find myself wondering how often I have stayed silent as a means of self-protection. It takes guts to risk everything – relationships, reputation, credibility or even safety – by taking a public stance for an unpopular person, reality or truth.
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 ‘Our own species is synonymous with screwing up.’ (Kathryn Schulz) Nigel Farage mocked the EU Parliament after the controversial Brexit referendum result: ‘When I came here 17 years ago and I said I wanted to lead a campaign to get Britain to leave the European Union, you all laughed at me. Well, I have to say, you're not laughing now, are you?’ Margaret Thatcher laughed dismissively too in the UK Parliament when members of her own Government suggested that Nelson Mandela may become a major figure after imprisonment. Mandela later became one of the most internationally-admired leaders of the 20th century. Jesus Christ also met with laughter when he claimed that a young girl who had died was ‘sleeping’. The crowd jeered sarcastically yet Jesus took the girl’s hand, spoke to her – and restored her life. Matthew Henry commented: 'They would never again laugh at any word of his.' We can see a pattern appear. The mistakes weren't simple stupidity. People extrapolated from the world they knew. They assumed current ‘realities’ (e.g. politics, economics, cultural beliefs, Divine activity) would stay fixed. History changes when assumed constraints disappear.  ‘Every now and then a word from the unconscious which I do not want insinuates itself into my discourse.’ (Terry Eagleton) When Keir Starmer proudly announced in PMQs this week that he’d struck a trade deal with North Korea, I turned to my daughter sitting beside me and asked, ‘Did he really just say that?!’ She replied, ‘Freudian slip. He secretly admires Kim Jong Un’s dictatorship.’ We both laughed. Well, half-laughed. Many a true word is spoken in jest. Even a serving Labour MP has complained to me subtly about Tsarmer’s authoritarian style. An autocrat imposes their agenda by coercion and force. It's time to elect a real leader.  ‘The prime minister has insisted he will fight any attempt to bring him down.’ (HuffPost UK) What a week. As if things weren’t already unstable and turbulent enough on the world stage, the UK government has gone into chaotic meltdown. Not with the opposition but within its own ranks. Against the backdrop of disastrous election results for the Labour party last week, and a loud-and-clear message from the UK public along the lines of 'Starmer is an appalling communicator who exercises terrible political judgement', we find ourselves rudderless, spluttering and adrift. One commentator on TV today said, satirically, that Starmer’s leadership style does more to drive voters towards Reform and Greens than anything those parties could do for themselves. Yet the turmoil is symptomatic of wider and deeper phenomena than the PM alone. The world is complex and Labour, like the Conservatives before them, is complex too: an internal coalition of competing and, at times, conflicting interests that make it hard to pursue a simple, single unified vision. Farage and Polanski will be glued to the new headlines this weekend. I think I will be too.  English translation of a talk I delivered for a 'Prayers for Peace' meeting in Germany this week: Martin Luther King is famous for having ‘a dream’ – a vision from God of a bright new reality that he was willing to live and die for. For him, peace was far more than the absence of conflict. After all, people, communities and even nations can co-exist alongside one-another for a time, even if there are tensions, grievances or injustices in and between them.* We see an example in history of ‘Pax Romana’ – a peace of sorts that the Roman Empire established and maintained by the overwhelming force of the military, rather than through building positive relationships between neighbouring peoples and societies. It was a way of holding an empire together by active coercion and brutal suppression of all dissent. The Roman historian, Tacitus, commented that, ‘They (the Romans) make a desert and call it peace.’ This was the world into which Jesus Christ was born. It helps us understand the dilemma for Pilate when some Jewish leaders said Jesus claimed to be King of the Jews. If the accusation were true, it could be a threat to ‘Pax Romana’. Pilate was forced to act. Martin Luther King calls this ‘negative peace’. It’s often better than open violence or war, yet because the underlying issues are not addressed or resolved, it’s likely to be a fragile state that could collapse at any time. Martin Luther King advocated for a ‘positive peace’, characterised by an active reaching towards the ‘other’ with love, forgiveness and hope. This is the peace we see modelled by Jesus Christ who reaches out actively towards us. He doesn’t ignore the problems and challenges but takes positive initiative to resolve them. This is what he calls us to do too. It’s a peace that reflects the Hebrew idea of ‘Shalom’ (שָׁלוֹם) – a holistic peace that includes restoration, safety, wholeness, harmony and wellbeing. As we look across the world today and see increasing tensions, conflicts and wars, let’s pray for a positive peace that is so much more than an absence of violence. Let’s pray especially for those who are so blinded by hate, hurt or self-interest that they can’t even imagine a different way or future. Let’s pray – with God’s help – for love, forgiveness and hope. *(e.g. Treaty of Versailles (1919); Treaty of Trianon (1920); Korean Armistice Agreement (1953); Israel-Lebanon May 17 Agreement (1983); Dayton Accord – Bosnia and Herzegovina (1995); Northern Ireland 'Peace without Reconciliation' (1998-present); Post-Civil War Libya (2011–present); India-Pakistan Ceasefire Agreement (2003/2021); Gaza Peace Plan (2025))  ‘Lost in space, and what is it worth, huh? The president just forgot about Earth: spending multi billions, and maybe even trillions, the cost of weapons ran into zillions.’ (Grandmaster Melle Mel & The Furious Five) On the same weekend that Christians around the world celebrated the miracle of life over death in Jesus Christ at Easter, a shot-down US airman was rescued on the ground from the grip of an enraged Iranian regime, hellbent on revenge. In this same weekend, the Artemis II space mission broke a new record for the farthest distance that human beings have travelled from Earth. I found myself wondering if, from that vantage point, the astronauts may be able to spot what alien planet Donald Trump is living on. The self-proclaimed man of peace issued an unhinged statement on social media that said: ‘Open the F****** strait, you crazy b*******, or you’ll be living in Hell – JUST WATCH!’, then signed off with, ‘Praise be to Allah’. It’s hardly a textbook page from 'How to Win Friends and Influence People', and I struggle to imagine that an ideologically-driven, Islamist regime, known for its repressive violence against its own people and its neighbours, would be intimidated by such a threat. Is the US President lost in space? Flash back just 6 months ago, to the Sharm El-Sheikh Peace Summit when world leaders queued up sycophantically to kiss the hand of this so-called peacemaker, standing proudly like a Pharaoh before the lights and the cameras. Or just 3 months ago, when the humble María Corina Machado self-sacrificially handed her Nobel Peace Prize medal to this sulking antihero who hadn’t won, hoping it would win favour for the oppressed people of Venezuela. It was shameful beyond words that he took it from her. And, as it continues, the shockwaves of this regional conflict are reverberating far across the globe. The Philippines was hit yesterday by another earthquake, shaking people’s already fragile lives. It felt hard, scary and symbolic. As a result of this war, those living on the edge of existence face relentless rises in food, energy and fuel prices and are struggling barely to survive. The poor have no reserves, stockpiles or insurance and nothing but their faith to fall back on. It’s appalling. ‘Earth to Trump…come in please..?’  ‘Sometimes you will never know the value of a moment until it becomes a memory.’ (Dr Seuss) Looking online this evening, I found myself browsing for the Palestinian Christian hospital where I worked with children and teenagers with disabilities in 1982. Much to my amazement, I found a very old photo of the hospital itself and one of the actual staff team I worked with. Vivid memories immediately came flooding back – the people, the sights, the sounds, the smells. This was during a previous Israeli invasion of Lebanon and I remember us watching the long column of tanks and other military vehicles rolling over the border on TV. The hospital was near Jerusalem in a small village called Bethany or, in Arabic, al-Azariya (‘the place of Lazarus’). I didn’t realise it back then but it was a significant place for Jesus during his earthly lifetime too. Looking at the photos, I find myself wondering: what happened to all those people in the picture? The man in the back row in the middle with a moustache was a very serious figure, and my boss. The man in the middle row at the far left, also with a moustache, showed me great kindness – and cried when I left. As war rages on again, I can only fear and hope for them – and pray.  ‘Democracies have no obligation to facilitate their own demise. Fascists can only succeed in conditions of excessive democratic tolerance.’ (Karl Loewenstein) As a teenage anti-Nazi activist in the UK, I can remember arguing vociferously that hard right parties like the British National Party and National Front should be banned. A wise older person disagreed with me, suggesting that banning parties simply drives them underground, out of view, and that makes them even more dangerous. He had a point. It’s a tough dilemma for democratic societies – one we face again now when UK society, like others throughout the West, is increasingly polarised between hard right nationalists, hard left progressives and ethnic sectarianism. The centre ground is losing ground and grasping weakly at paper straws to survive. The UK government has tried various tactics to address this, at times mimicking the hard right to appeal to voters on that front, then swinging towards the hard left in an attempt to appease voters heading in that direction. It looks chaotic, often driven more by pragmatic expediency than vision and values and, paradoxically, adds to the attraction of the extremes who appear far clearer, more principled and more decisive. The government also tried silencing free speech via police Non-Crime Hate Incident recording then, after widespread public backlash, repackaged elements in a counterproductive ‘Anti-Muslim Hostility’ definition that even Muslim leaders opposed. This level of instability and uncertainty, with its associated anxieties and risks, is driving some of those balancing precariously on the residual centre ground to argue that urgent and muscular action is needed to defend democracy itself (see, for instance, Paul Mason: Britain Needs Militant Democracy). I see profound resonances here in Germany (where I’m writing at the moment) with its dark history of fascism, where the Nazi party seized power by manipulating the liberal-democratic process to its own advantage – then subsequently dismantled it. German democrats are wringing their hands helplessly as they watch the rise of the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD). The hard left here argues that, if Germans had been more forceful (using violence, if necessary) to crush the Nazi party before it got into power, Germany and the wider world would have been spared the unspeakable horrors of the Third Reich. It’s a compelling argument until we question, along with Mahatma Gandhi, whether using violent means to achieve a non-violent end is ethically defensible and effective practically. Martin Luther King cautions that ‘The ends cannot be used to justify the means because the ends are pre-existent in the means’. I pray for wisdom and courage in the face of such challenges. Democracy itself hangs in the balance.  ‘Globalisation has obliterated distance, not just physically but also, most dangerously, mentally. It creates the illusion of intimacy when, in fact, the mental distances have changed little. It has concertinaed the world without engendering the necessary respect, recognition and tolerance that must accompany it.’ (Martin Jacques) At a Chinese New Year celebration meal last week, I looked around the dinner table at my family: my brother who lived in Brunei, his Malaysian wife, my sister who lived in Germany, her husband who travels the world with work, my niece who lived in Spain, my nephew who also lived in Spain and my Mum who has visited more countries than she can remember. My daughters are internationally-minded too: one taught herself Japanese and the other recently visited Austria. It struck me how much the world has changed in my own lifetime. The ability to communicate and build relationships with people all over the world has never been easier, thanks to advances in technology. International travel has never been easier too, at least for those who have the financial resources and visa permits to do it. Given these opportunities to rub shoulders with our global neighbours, we might expect a ‘one world’ outlook increasingly to predominate. Yet, take a cursory glance across current news headlines and we see an increasingly polarised world, divided along national, political and ideological lines. We see a profound fracturing in the breakdown of the rules-based international order with nationalism on the rise, and within nations where different -isms or -phobias tear at each other in heated culture wars. Perhaps global idealists forgot a deep human desire for distinctive identity, belonging, security – and power?  ‘Father, forgive them because they don’t know what they’re doing.’ (Jesus Christ) I spent some days last week on a retreat at a Franciscan friary in the bitterly-cold North East of England. It’s something I choose to do each New Year these days – a retreat, that is, not to half freeze to death in a stone-built monastery. It’s a way of transitioning from the past year to the new, a spiritual defragmentation or reset of sorts, with a renewed and refreshed focus on God. The biggest challenge each time is to get over myself, to somehow disentangle myself enough from the fog of my own mental and emotional hopes, fears and preoccupations to see...Jesus. A recurring theme that emerged for me during my times of prayer and reflection was power. I read two starkly-contrasting accounts of people at Auschwitz during the Nazi era: the brutal guard Irma Grese who used her structural power to commit the most unspeakable acts of violence against prisoners, vs the self-sacrificing Franciscan friar Maximillian Kolbe who used his personal power to die in the place of another prisoner. Both were ordinary human beings. A critical, defining difference in that moment, in that context, was how each abused or used their power. I sat now in the candle-lit chapel, gazing at a harrowing figure of Jesus Christ, represented here as apparently-powerless, cruelly-beaten and tortured on a cross, straining upwards to glimpse his heavenly Father. It struck me how the world has become dominated (again) by power figures and ideologies, finding their voice through polarising politicians and political religions, and how so many people are flocking to support them. It’s symptomatic of widespread feelings of powerlessness and a desire to increase our own power via their power. Grese vs Kolbe? Father, forgive us. |
Nick WrightI'm a psychological coach, trainer and OD consultant. Curious to discover how can I help you? Get in touch! 
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