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A spiritual comment and prayer to begin the day with Fr Dermot Preston

Good morning.

Roy was my age 鈥� about 8 years old. He had a much older sister, but no contemporary siblings, so when he visited his grandparents on our street, he moved into the orbit of the Preston tribe.

With my brothers and sisters, Roy found ready companions in those summer days: together we played cricket on cobbled streets, were chased by the park-rangers and, in the spare ground on Brunel Street, constructed a system of interlocking grass hide-outs as epic and ambitious in their planning as Albert Speer鈥檚 Berlin.

One morning Roy came to look for us. He went to the back of the house 鈥� front entrances for visitors, locals round the back - and he knocked on the kitchen door. My mum opened the door; she was then in her late-30s, a dark-haired Irish doctor. Roy had not met her before.

She smiled and asked could she help.

In total innocence, Roy just looked at her and asked 鈥淐an your brothers and sisters come out to play?鈥�

You can guess my mum鈥檚 delight in the compliment, and it was a story which she took pleasure in re-telling for years to come.

It is perhaps the instinct of children to be honest messengers. For some reason, when we grow older we become more restrained; indeed, we actually filter out the positive and 鈥榟onest feedback鈥� can become a euphemism for just being negative. And if it is just negative, it is rarely honest.

I remember once a Jesuit colleague, deeply frustrated after returning from a requiem Mass, said to me 鈥淲hy did they leave it to his funeral to say all the good things about him??鈥�

Lord, today will have easy opportunities to tear down and destroy: help me instead to be an agent of blessing and joy.

Amen.

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