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Good Morning,

A deeply admired friend, Helen Bamber, died last month. She was short in height, but immense in stature.

Perhaps it was the trauma she encountered in her troubled upbringing which led her to her life’s tasks.

Helen volunteered for the Jewish Relief Unit in 1945 and worked with survivors of the Holocaust in Bergen-Belsen. Later, after years with Amnesty International, she established the Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture, and, at the age of 80, her own Helen Bamber Foundation ‘to listen to the silences’.

In a world full of violence, innocent people are constantly caught in the middle of conflicts, in Iraq, Syria, Gaza, Israel. I visited injured Israelis, and wounded children from Gaza. The question left in my heart by so much suffering was: ‘How can we help to bring healing?’

All kinds of wounds afflict our troubled world. There’s the physical distress of hunger, disease, and bodies sfigured by war. There’s the trauma of witnessing acts of such brutality and cruelty that most of us, mercifully, cannot even imagine them. There are wounds of hate and broken trust, between faith and faith, country and country.

Yet I believe that at heart we would all rather be among the healers than among those who add to the hatred.

If so, we need to pay attention to the stories of others, to their dignity, suffering, dreams and sometimes also their grievances.

If we want to diminish anger and fear, and restore the bonds of trust, we need Helen’s gift of listening, with compassion, to the silence.

In this world full of pain and violence, God, help us to be healers.