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For those who like sport – as participants or spectators - the excitement and energy of the Commonwealth Games is palpable. But do the Games have significance in other ways? I wondered about that after watching the opening ceremony and thinking back to a conversation I'd just had with some friends. We'd been talking about our holidays. We'd all either been to or flown over places where there was conflict – conflicts whose roots were religious, ethnic, cultural. Such is the world we live in. One of the group challenged us to say how we would ease the tensions and stop the conflicts. Everything we proposed was unrealistic. It involved wishing away somebody's religion, race, culture, and suppressing their historic memory. As one of us put it, 'If only we could eliminate difference and erase memory, we could have peace.' Which is exactly how people have sought solutions throughout history – not least the religious. Both Christianity and Islam do seem to suppose that the way to universal peace is to have one universal religion – namely theirs. Or do they? I can't speak for Islam, but when I look at the Christian scriptures there are interesting counter readings all the time. Jesus, for instance, finds faith in a Roman centurion who is a pagan. He makes a Samaritan, not a Jew like himself, the moral exemplar in his parable. And so on. This should at least make Christians pause before wishing some homogeneous future. Imposing one religion, ensuring that one racial group holds the power, suppressing alternative cultures – that has been and often still is the way groups seek to resolve tensions, because finding ways of living with difference involves leaps of imagination and acts of faith that require a lot of effort and will. Perhaps it has to start with a simple appreciation of the good in others, others who are different from us. And that brings me back to Glasgow and the Commonwealth Games. Is this one way of encouraging and enabling that appreciation? As I watched the opening I was struck by the way people were taking pride in two things. One was pride in their own country. But the other was pride in the Commonwealth as an idea, a coming together of many people of different races, religions and cultures. But then, even more interesting, the Games also showed that learning to appreciate the other does not mean we can't be critical of one another. One such moment was the same-sex kiss in the opening ceremony – a pointed reference to the criminalization of homosexuality in some countries. This is the kind of comment that can be made among friends - friends who are committed to the idea that living together has to be about living with difference not suppressing it. Even if sometimes we need our friends to show us what that means in practice.