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Exactly twenty years ago the commercial centre of Manchester was shattered by a bomb placed by the IRA in a van in Corporation Street. Telephone warnings and reactions from the emergency services meant the area was evacuated in time, mercifully preventing any deaths, though over 200 people were injured, some seriously.

Those at the Pulse gay nightclub in Orlando earlier this week were given no time to escape. The last messages to their families of some of the forty-nine people murdered there wring our hearts. This vile crime, which struck a group which already feels vulnerable, demands that we strengthen our solidarity with all our fellow human beings, irrespective of race, creed or sexual orientation.

I’ve spent the last years studying the letters of my grandmother and her siblings in Nazi Europe, and writing about their fate. Some escaped with their bare lives; some perished.

I sometimes ask myself – what’s the point of recalling such terrors and their hapless victims?

But looking horror in the face is essential if we wish to change. Only by acknowledging our capacity to destroy can we take responsibility for it, and control it.

I’m moved whenever I visit the church of St Ethelburga’s in the City of London. Bombed in 1993, it was repaired, but in a way which leaves the fault-lines from the blast clearly visible, as an enduring reminder of the power of human destructiveness.

The church became a centre of reconciliation and peace, within faiths, between faiths, and between humanity and the rest of creation. It works to create understanding and facilitate co-operation.

God, may the memory of violence and destruction teach us to honour all life.