Courtney McGrailDear Editor, In the face of the horrors being perpetrated by ‘terrorists’, I must ask myself, “What can I do?”
Whether I am old or young, poor or rich, I have been gifted with the possibility of doing something worthwhile in my lifetime.
I know what it feels like to yearn to be loved and approved of. So today, now, I plan to make someone else feel needed, appreciated and cared about.
Looking as much as I can at the background of the lone terrorist, it usually seems that he was a person grappling with serious needs, unanswered longings, anger, fear of rejection and, perhaps, hatred of the desperate promptings to evil that he himself is planning.
No-one can change that person now. (Isn’t it great that God is our all-knowing, final Judge?)
There is a message there for all of us: There is surely someone, old or young, out there today, to whom I can mediate God’s love and encouragement.
To promise prayer may seem like ‘pie-in-the-sky’. Prayer is not socially valued because we can see no instantaneous results, and we are a generation longing dizzily for immediate gratification.
But to struggle to pray in faith is to nurture the deepest root from which the healing of the world can come. In prayer we touch the very Heart of God from which compassion springs taking shape in our practical works of love and flowing over in drops to create an ocean of healing.
The terrorised world is hungry for the combination of our prayer and care – now.
Yours etc.,
Angela Macnamara,
Churchtown, Dublin 14.
