From the Parish Priest

In July came the blackest day in the history of England for a long, long time.

The London Bombs.

It's not the number of deaths and injuries that really gets to us, it's the unrest and the fear that such actions bring, and at the very heart of it, there's anger and bitterness and all kinds of questions.

Why London? Who could do such a thing? How can God allow it? Questions easy to ask, but so, so difficult to answer.

Scientists have spent generations trying to work out how our world started. From those very early attempts recorded in the Bible - the stories of creation in Genesis, through people like Galileo and Darwin. Of course the scientists of our own generation are still embarking on the same research. Only recently we saw pictures of a rocket crashing into a comet so that the scientists could study the dust and according to them find out more about the beginning of creation.

Well as scientists pursue their particular research, theologians are kept busy too, and at the hub of their studies is trying to find out how evil came into the world. Why do people cause so much injury and suffering as they did in London, or in Turkey or in Iraq?

God loved us, and created us in his image. Did he plant evil to trap us? Did he twist our minds so that we enjoy harming his people and his creation? I don't think so.

That's certainly not the kind of God spoken about by Jesus, even if the Old Testament describes God as more judgmental and more like a warrior.

Jesus taught us that his father and ours is a loving, caring Father who is concerned about each one of us. So why do we have evil? In the book Genesis, the story of Esau and Jacob, evil appears. Jacob managed to con his brother's inheritance from him simply because Esau was hungry - wanting to eat some of that "red stuff"!

Put simply, we have evil because we need to survive. The same instinct which makes us kill a chicken to feed our children will also make us kill a person we see attacking our children. How we use that instinct is up to us, and surely that's the key. God gives us the ability to do all kinds of things - good and bad, and we choose how to use those abilities. We're not clones but humans, so we think for ourselves and that means sometimes we get things wrong and go completely against God's will.

We live with good and evil in us and around us. For most of the time we cope with that. Think for a moment about an ambulance. The parents of a very sick child saved after being rushed to hospital will say: "Thank God for that ambulance." The parents of the child run over and killed by that very same ambulance will say: "How can God allow it to happen?" We live with good and evil around us. Believing in Jesus, believing in the sanctity of life, believig that God loves each one of us is not simple. It's one of the most difficult things we do. We must hold to our beliefs however, and even in the face of death and destruction - be it from war or from terrorism, we must not allow ourselves to sink to the depths of those who cause the violence.

Ours is to pray continually and to demonstrate to those around us that our faith in Christ is sure and our hope for the future is certain.

FR MIKE