Two attacks in local villages, leaving 17 dead in one and eight in another, says my teacher friend from Kaduna State in Nigeria in one of his latest letters. He writes regularly about the threats that he and his family and students face from Islamist militias. But what stays in my mind, apart from the horror of the details, is his steadfast refusal to demonise his Muslim neighbours and his eagerness to find resources to think (and pray) through what he needs to do and to communicate. He wants to learn what it is that stops cycles of retribution; he wants to break out of the mentality which assumes that what matters is to have enough firepower to intimidate and silence what threatens you. You may ‘win’ tomorrow, and in doing so condemn your grandchildren to another murderous round of conflict later.

Some conflicts – like these local atrocities in Nigeria – hardly break the surface in our news media. But there is for me something of immense authority in the determination of someone like my friend to go on asking what breaks the cycle. It’s impossible not to contrast this with the frenzied rhetoric of Vladimir Putin’s clerical allies in Russia. Paint yourself as the helpless victim driven, alas, to extreme measures by the inevitability of an assault that has not actually happened. Deeply entrenched power loves to depict itself as fragile and easily victimised. Quite a bit of US politics seems deeply wedded to this mythology of the persecuted majority, the vulnerability of the vastly wealthy and resourceful (Donald Trump fantasising about being marched to court in handcuffs). Or, for that matter, the vulnerability of a powerfully endowed progressive establishment in many institutions, busily weaponising grievances and creating fresh tribal markers, new sins against the Holy Ghost. Easy for us to slip down that slope; that’s why I sometimes wish my friend’s letters could be on everyone’s screen.

‘God, guns, Trump’ as some of the posters at recent rallies have it: as though the answer to the real sense of grievance in so many forgotten, despised, struggling communities were simply the dream of a great final assertion of force. The technology of violence, the magnetism of a huge and troubled personality, and the appeal to a supernaturally magnified version of such a personality, all working together to guarantee that we are defended against any and every troubling stranger. It was St Augustine who first spotted that power and privilege eroded the well-being of the oppressor as much as the oppressed; and that ratcheting up the fear of the troubling stranger was a very shaky foundation for dealing with internal conflicts and fragilities. He has no illusions about the inevitability of the use of force in some circumstances (he would understand President Zelensky); he simply wants us to be clear about the dangers of imagining that God needs defending, and that we can clothe ourselves in God’s righteousness against our opponents in a way that licenses us to do what we like in God’s name.

And St Augustine himself mostly failed to notice that this was exactly what Christian communities were learning so successfully to do to their Jewish neighbours. At this time of year, we cannot forget how the narratives and liturgies of Holy Week and Easter have been abused. One of this week’s tasks for me has been to examine a thesis on the life and work of Maria Skobtsova, a spectacularly eccentric Russian nun in pre-war Paris, whose work with Jewish refugees led to her arrest and eventual execution in Ravensbrück. When the occupying Germans imposed the wearing of the yellow star on French Jews, she declared that all Christians ought to wear the same badge in solidarity. It was a refusal of what for most of us is the default setting, the urge to be safe at the expense of the stranger. It is the uncomfortable message at the heart of this season of the Christian year – which is what makes it all the more painful that we can turn even this story into another iteration of Our virtue and Their evil.

As events crop up for the fourth centenary of the publication of Shakespeare’s First Folio, I’m occasionally asked if I have a favourite Shakespeare line. There are lines that glow in the mind for different reasons (‘O she’s warm!’ ‘Undo this button’…), but one that keeps coming back is from Measure for Measure: ‘He that might the vantage best have took / Found out the remedy.’ The power Christians contemplate at this season is not coercion but an infinite freedom from fear or resentment that is able to raise the tortured and abandoned to life. Whether in Kaduna, Moscow or our own hearts, this is what we so need to know is real.