A Reflection on When Power Slips Its Mask
There is a certain grandeur in power when it stands clothed in nobility, tempered by wisdom and yoked to justice. One sees it in the best of our human endeavours: the statesman who resigns with grace, the parent who yields authority to encourage growth, the teacher who invites challenge rather than suppresses it. Yet power, left to its own devices, has a tendency to become forgetful. Untethered from responsibility, it becomes something else, something more insidious. It becomes violence.
Now, I do not mean the spectacle of violence that floods our newsfeeds: the broken bodies, the shattered glass, the blood-soaked headlines. That kind of violence is vulgar and recognisable. What I wish to consider here is the more refined sort, the violence that dresses for dinner and speaks with polished vowels. The kind that hides in the folds of our institutions, in our jokes, in our liturgies, and in our silences.
The transition from power to violence is not always marked by a loud bang or a sudden collapse. Sometimes it is marked only by a sigh. The sigh of the disregarded. The sigh of the receptionist who is spoken to as if she were part of the furniture. The sigh of the child whose question is ignored, not out of malice, but out of sheer adult haste. It is in these moments that violence finds its quietest triumph.
For you see, power that forgets its origin in relationship becomes domination. And domination, when it settles into the muscles and reflexes of a culture, becomes violence. Not dramatic violence, but ambient violence. Like a faint background radiation, it permeates the ordinary. It becomes the air we breathe.
I have sat in committee meetings where this violence moved like a ghost in the room: no voices raised, no accusations made, and yet an entire category of people rendered invisible by the structure of the conversation. I have heard sermons, well-meaning and finely crafted, that inflicted wounds in the name of orthodoxy. I have read policies that harm without malice, simply because the language assumed that some lives matter more than others. None of this makes headlines. But they leaves unmistakable bruises.
So then, what is our task, we who would be thoughtful, awake, gentle?
It is, first and foremost, to bear witness.
To bear witness is not to stand above and judge. It is to stand beside and notice. To speak aloud what others have been trained not to see. It is to name the violence that hides in plain sight: the careless phrase, the demeaning policy, the withering glance, the holy word twisted into a lash.
But bearing witness is not only about the naming of harm. It is also about naming what is not violent. That too is part of the resistance. To bear witness to joy, to moments of kindness, to acts of tenderness in a brutal world, these are not sentimental diversions, but fierce acts of rehumanisation. In naming what heals, we reclaim a language that has not yet been weaponised.
In this new series of reflections, I invite you to join me in a kind of contemplative archaeology. Together, we shall dig beneath the surface of the ordinary and ask difficult questions: What does our speech conceal? What wounds do our structures leave behind? Where does the violence dwell in what we have come to call “normal”?
Each reflection will shine a quiet light on a different facet of the unnoticed violence in our lives, linguistic, interpersonal, institutional, aesthetic, even sacred. We will look not only at what is done, but at what is left undone; not only at what is said, but at what is carefully left unsaid.
And each piece will come with an invitation. Not a sermon. Not a command. But a simple prompt to bear witness, to something seen, or felt, or perhaps long ignored. And alongside that, an invitation to name joy, and to practice hope, not as a shield from sorrow but as its honest companion.
We will not end violence by naming it, but we may begin to loosen its grip. And in so doing, perhaps we will also become more careful with our power, more deliberate in our presence, and more open to that strange and luminous gift, relationship.
So let us begin.
Let us listen to the words we use, to the silences we keep, and to the small, stubborn voices that refuse to be erased.
Let us look again at our tables, our titles, our traditions and ask what dignity they guard, and what dignity they deny.
And let us, above all, bear witness.
To the harm we have seen.
To the wounds we have caused.
And, perhaps most urgently, to the possibility of peace.
