Those who are not from this part of the world may possibly have never heard of Dunblane in Scotland, where a gunman walked into a primary school and shot and killed many of the children. I seem to remember that St. Luke's school had very different circumstances (I think it involved a machete), but the carnage was similar enough to have the same effect on those involved, as well as  those who looked on. 

The news sometimes has a way of displaying a vicious kind of irony. In the midst of the Dunblane Inquiry's reopening of the wounds, a few hundred miles away, in another school another scene of carnage, and as with Dunblane, the local community clustered around St. Luke's in Wolverhampton are coming together for mutual support.

It so happens that one of the injured children was a three year old muslim, and in the picture on the cover of yesterday's Herald, the anguish of his father was plain to see. Like Shylock, muslims hurt and bleed the same as other people. How sad that it so often takes a tragedy to make us recognise just how much we all have in common, and in particular traumatic events affecting our children to bring home our shared humanity to the community at large.

Current events just across the Irish sea highlight once more just how cancerous it can be to define ourselves primarily in terms of how we differ. All around the world there are those who brandish the slogans of the politics of fear, dependent for their power on their ability to persuade others of the alien nature of those they disagree with, for one of the first requirements of war is to dehumanize the enemy.

Why do we recognise our love for children as central to our humanity? Children are of their nature helpless before the power of the adult community, yet we recognize that we should refrain from brutalizing them to force them to our service. We see the fears and weakness of our children as a mirror to our own, and instead of exercising our power, treat them as we would wish to be treated ourselves. In our relationship with our children, we see the primary aspects of Divine Nature, Compassion and Mercy. Qur'an says of God "Call Him the One God, or call Him the All-merciful."

Muhammad's wife Aisha told of how a tribesman came to the Prophet saying "You people kiss your children! We don't!" To which he replied "I can't put mercy into your hearts if God has taken it away." Similarly, when a tribesman bragged of having ten children yet never kissing any of them, the Prophet said "Whoever isn't merciful will himself receive no mercy."