One question that I grapple with is why some people have faith and others do not. I am not thinking of people who reject the possibility of religious faith but of those, rather, who want to believe and cannot. I was struck a few years ago by the comments made by the priest who celebrated the funeral Mass for novelist Maeve Binchy.
She is reported as having said to the former parish priest of Dalkey, a Fr McDonagh: ‘I know that if you are around when I die then you will dispatch me with dignity and without hypocrisy in a faith which I envy and would love to share.’