Fearne Cotton sits in

Ruth Scott, Anglican Priest and Quaker:

Earlier this week, Fearne, you spoke about seeing half an hour of the new ‘Avengers’ film, and how you aren’t allowed to speak about the content to anyone, on pain of… I’m not sure what! Welcome to my world! Much of what I do is about creating private, sometimes secret, confidential, spaces in which individuals and groups can grapple with the conflicts that are tearing them apart, or explore safely the doubts and questions they don’t feel able to air publicly. As a priest and psychotherapist my husband, Chris, is also bound by confidentiality. We’ve spent a lot of our life together being unable to talk about much of what we do, to the point that we often don’t tell one another news we can talk about – a state of affairs our children tease us about constantly. We live in a society where people talk much more openly now about personal problems, and that can be helpful, but sometimes confidential conversations are essential.

Yesterday was the 20th anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement in Belfast. The journey to that Agreement depended upon different groups involved in the conflict meeting together under the public radar to begin to listen to one another in order to find a way towards ending the violence – politicians and paramilitaries of all persuasions who would have been roundly condemned, and even found their lives at risk, had their meetings been known about. Abbeys and other church places were among the venues hosting them, providing confidential spaces in which to talk with those they defined as the ‘enemy’.

When Jesus said, ‘Blessed are the peacemakers’ it wasn’t a sentimental blessing. Peacebuilding requires enemies to engage differently with one another, for people of violence to choose to lay down their weapons. This is costly, and can’t happen overnight. One of my favourite sculptures is by Raymond Watson who cast in bronze the raised hands of those who negotiated the Good Friday Agreement. Their public “yes!” to the peace process would not have been possible without all the private conversations that paved the way to a better future.