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Available for over a year

It’s half term for many. And for me the chance to spend some time with my teenage nieces and nephew. Conversation through the weekend ranged over revision, rugby and whether or not the next children’s strike will be a big deal in their school. They also talked about gender politics – what to do about facilities for the trans person that cannot anymore use the boys’ toilets and how to relate to the person who identifies with neither gender. These were clearly unsettling questions as so much of school life requires the binary choice – which uniform applies, which toilets to use, how do the girls feel about someone they’ve known as a boy sharing their facilities. But I was impressed by the maturity of the conversation that recognised the unsettling feelings but did not project them onto the people most closely concerned or just unthinkingly reinforce the binary. So much of our current political and social climate worries me because often it does not demonstrate that same maturity – the ability to be unsettled and not blame it on those who are different; the ability to resist binary solutions that shore up our own worlds but ignore or even seek to obliterate the other. It worries me because if we fuel our thinking with our fears, we risk our ability to think about underlying issues, and may undermine the very stability we crave. Donald Trump’s wall is perhaps a ‘meta metaphor’ for all this – it’s not that economic migration across land borders does not present real issues – it’s that the real issues for both sides can become obscured in the emotionally cathartic but socially destructive processes of demonisation. And sadly, such destructive processes are alive and well on our side of the Atlantic too. As politicians in Parliament and the rest of us on social media pour our fears and anxieties into our own chosen solutions to the Brexit mess, so we risk creating the ideal conditions in which extremism can flourish well beyond the 29 March – the extremism that exploits fears and offers binary solutions to complex problems as if the parts of the jigsaw that matter are only those we are already grasping in our own hands. Jesus is reported to have said again and again, ‘Do not be afraid.’ And repeatedly he showed what he meant by crossing social and political boundaries in order to make contact with those who were ‘othered’ or demonised in his context, in order to rehabilitate them, but also to challenge everyone else to think again about what God desires – not the security of the like-minded few, but the flourishing of the diverse many. Not to let fear win; not to indulge our most primitive instincts when we are afraid is a choice we are free to make. We can choose – in any situation - to back off those faux solutions that fail to address underlying splits and their causes and choose instead to focus on how to make contact across divides so that we build a more stable future in which more of our voices – not least our young people’s - can truly be heard.