"How like a widow is the city once great among the nations." Those words from the book of lamentations went through my mind as I heard of yesterday's terrible events in Madrid. And all we can offer the people of Spain is the human solidarity of grief, our voices joined in prayer for healing for the injured, comfort for the bereaved, courage for the survivors, and strength for those still engaged in rescue.

This was an evil deed, devastating in its scope, tragic in its consequences. And I feel all the more emotional having just made a trip to Jerusalem to visit the victims of terror there. Rarely do we see its long term effects. For a day or two, news of an atrocity fills our screens and then the attention of the media moves elsewhere. But what is left behind are shattered lives, scars, trauma and grief that may never fully heal. We sat with an eleven year old boy who'd lost half his family when a bomb went off in a restaurant; and he himself was now blind. We sat with other children who'd been on their way to school when the bus exploded, killing their friends and changing their world forever.

That's what makes terror so much worse than war. In war there's a battlefield; in terror a shop, an office, a train, can become a battlefield. In war there are targets; in terror anyone is a target - the innocent, the passers-by, the uninvolved. In war there is a logic. In terror there is no logic, because there never was nor ever will be anything achieved by it that could not have been achieved by other means. No responsible government can ever negotiate with terror, because to give in to it is not to end it but to invite yet more. Terror has no defence. It's born, not of despair, but of contempt. It's destruction for destruction's sake.

And how ironic that this should have taken place in Spain where once, a thousand years ago, Jews, Christians and Muslims lived together more peaceably and creatively than anywhere else in medieval Europe. Today throughout the world the very soul of liberty is being tested. It's no accident that these bombs went off just days before a general election, because terror is the ultimate enemy of democratic freedom; the attempt not to reason with but to kill those with whom you disagree. Which is why it will always fail. Love of life will always defeat disdain for life. Dear God, may it do so soon.

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