News: on the coming Tuesday October 20th, at 9.30am you can hear me on One To One – BBC Radio 4 – 9.30.
In two programmes I’ll be exploring  what the idea of Home means – to two very different people. On Tuesday I’ll be in Birmingham to meet student Alan, who shares a rented house with friends. While they return home to their parents at weekends, Alan stays in the student digs, the only home he currently has. He explains  how family breakdown led to him to be homeless twice, first emotionally and then physically when his mother finally evicted him and his possessions from her house when he was eighteen. Now twenty four, Alan describes how devastated he felt and how through the help of a local charity he got back onto his feet again.

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NOW – to this week’s Thought for the Week in my Daily Mail column.

“Despite all the darkness, human hope is based on the instinct that at the deepest level of reality some intimate kindness holds sway.”

John O’Donohue (1956-2008, Irish poet and philosopher)

Do you ever experience black days when there really does feel like humanity is going backwards? I had a ‘blip’ like that back in the summer – when, for the whole month of July, I felt low in body, mind and spirit. To be blunt, it is very hard to sustain optimism when there are murdering, vicious psychopaths like those thugs and vandals who call themselves ISIS walking on the face of this poor world.

Always somebody who tries hard to believe the best about humanity, I found myself faltering. What happened? Bad news, disillusion with politics, horror t the evil that seems to exist within so many people…I’m sure you will recognize some of these feelings.

Yet they must be fought. Surely they must always be fought – otherwise we would just give up. And THAT cannot be allowed. Just to look out of the window of the beauty of the world, or to read about the selfless heroism of people who enhance the human race, calls all despair into question.

So – we come to people like John O’Donohue. I knew nothing about this holy man until I came across his prayerful book ‘Anam Cara’. Then I realized that I had, some years earlier, bought a book of his poetry, ‘Connemara Blues.’ Thus are some writers destined to enter your life.

To find out more about this remarkable poet, philosopher and man of the spirit,  (who died in his sleep long before it was his time…but who can say what is the right time, for any of us?) I would just put his name into a search engine, and take it from there.

What I just want to leave you with here is the idea of empathy. My daughter and I were talking today about what she and I most want for her children, my grandchildren. ‘What do you think is the word in my mind?’ I asked her. She didn’t hesitate. ‘Kindness,’ she said, ‘Yes, and most of all I want my children to be kind.’ Without that most precious human quality, we open the floodgates to the darkness. If our belief in kindness dies we are swept away into chaos. The war (and yes, it is a war – although most of us hate the word) is against evil. Against the death of the heart.