Rowan Williams

To mark the celebration of the Annunciation (‘Lady Day’, 25 March), a friend sends me an image of her favourite picture of the angel’s appearance to the Virgin Mary – a painting by the African-American artist Henry Ossawa Tanner, who worked mostly in France in the first decades of the last century. Mary is a very young Middle Eastern peasant woman, shrinking into the rumpled sheets of a bed roughly screened off from a plain stone domestic interior, as a blinding pillar of light hovers in the foreground. As my friend said, it shows not the serenity of many images of the event, but an acute apprehensiveness. This may be good news but it is also, quite simply, terrifying. Nothing is going to be the same again. Sarah Mullally was installed as Archbishop of Canterbury on 25 March.

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.