Nonviolent engagement

This weekend, nonviolence found me in a bookshop.

Usually, I encounter it in the natural world — in cliffs and rain, in wind through trees, in the stillness that reminds me I am part of something larger and slower than the urgency of modern life. Nature steadies me. It teaches restraint, interdependence, humility. It is where my spirit recalibrates.

But this weekend, in Edinburgh, it arrived differently.

Among dusty shelves and uneven floors in vintage bookshops, I found myself returning to older roots — history, memory, stories carried through paper. There is something quietly restorative about second-hand books; they hold traces of previous lives, previous hands, previous thoughts. They resist disposability. They ask us to slow down.

And sitting there, reading a history of Arsenal F.C. — because, as any youth worker knows, supporting a football team is essentially a professional requirement — I found myself reflecting on the club’s recent partnership with Deel. Deel is a global HR and payroll platform co-founded in 2019 by French-Israeli entrepreneur Alex Bouaziz who has spoken in support of IDF and the genocide in Palestine.

It would be easy not to think about it too deeply. Football is saturated with corporate sponsorship. We are conditioned to accept branding as background noise. But nonviolence, at least as I understand it, asks us to remain awake to systems — to notice what becomes normal, what becomes invisible, what values are quietly being reinforced.

So I sat with the discomfort.

What does it mean to love a club while remaining critical of the economic and corporate structures around it? What does ethical support look like in a world where identity and consumption are increasingly intertwined? Can you still belong while refusing unquestioning participation?

For me, the answer is yes. Nonviolence is not purity. It is practice. It is the ongoing discipline of refusing to surrender moral reflection simply because something is popular, profitable, or culturally embedded. It is recognising that we are always participating in systems, but still asking how we might do so more consciously, more ethically, more humanely.

So no, I won’t buy the new kit. Not because I reject the club, but because I care enough to remain attentive. To hold affection and critique together. To resist the idea that loyalty requires silence.

Youth work teaches this too. Young people do not need adults who perform certainty. They need adults willing to think critically, act ethically, and model that belonging does not require abandoning conscience. And perhaps that is part of what nonviolence really is, not withdrawal from the world,
but deeper engagement with it. A refusal to stop asking questions. A refusal to let comfort replace ethics. A commitment to living gently and truthfully within systems that often encourage neither.

This weekend, I found that reminder not on a mountainside, but between old books, in the quiet turning of pages, and in the strange grace of paying attention.

Community – the past is present

This week, I met a man who once imagined something into being. Not an idea in the abstract, but a place. A meeting point. A vision that would eventually become Forthspring — the community I now have the privilege of helping to lead. https://www.forthspring.org/

What struck me most was not nostalgia. It was continuity.

The Reverend Sam Birch is a prominent Methodist minister in Belfast known for his extensive peacebuilding work during and after the Troubles. During the height of the Troubles, Rev. Birch gained recognition for his quiet but vital cross-community work, which famously included partnering with Redemptorist priest Father Gerry Reynolds to reach out to grieving families across sectarian divides.

The vision Sam Birch had has not dimmed with time. It remains bright, rooted in people, sustained by relationship, animated by the belief that community matters deeply. As he spoke, he returned constantly to others — to connection, to encounter, to the importance of creating spaces where people can belong across difference.

And I realised how much of that vision still lives. Not only in the building itself, but in the daily practice of what happens there: tea shared across divides, young people finding safety, communities choosing relationship over retreat. Forthspring was never simply about services. It was — and is — about sustaining human connection in a world that increasingly fragments it.

That feels profoundly linked to the principles of nonviolence. Not nonviolence as passivity, but as intentional, relational work. The understanding that peace is not merely the absence of conflict, but the presence of justice, dialogue, participation, and shared humanity.

Nonviolence begins in how we see one another. It is built through spaces where people are listened to, where dignity is practised, where fear does not get the final word. It asks us to resist the easy pull towards isolation, suspicion, and dehumanisation, and instead to remain committed to relationship — especially when it is difficult.

That is what I heard in his reflections this week. A belief that communities are not sustained through control or performance, but through care. Through ordinary acts of welcome. Through people willing to hold open spaces where others can gather, speak, disagree, heal, and imagine differently together.

In many ways, sustaining Forthspring now feels like inheriting not only a building, but a practice of nonviolence. A commitment to connection in a culture of division. A commitment to encounter in a time of withdrawal. A commitment to hope that is active, not naïve. And perhaps that is why his vision still feels so alive.

Because the need for places like Forthspring has not disappeared. If anything, it has become more urgent.

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