Today two groups of people will assemble to reflect on the crisis in Syria and how to bring the suffering to an end. Both groups find chemical weapons deeply offensive and want to see an end to their use. Neither groups have any power of their own, but the group on the right, meeting last year have either been delegated power through millions of ballot boxes, or else have it as a result of birth into the right family of through the use of force. Whilst few people know all of their names, most people could certainly name a proportion of those assembled. They know that all that they do and say is analysed by Billions of people and this level scrutiny makes finding creative solutions incredibly difficult.

The group on the Left are known to very few people in the world, although the most powerful person from the group on the right should be familiar with their work. They are a small group of Cistercian Nuns who in March 2005 moved from the Monastery of Valserena in Tuscany to Aleppo, Syria, to found a new monastic community. The nuns were inspired to take up the legacy of seven monks who were martyred in 1997 in Algeria. The sisters wanted to follow the example set by these men, who had totally dedicated their lives to God and their neighbours, both Christian and Muslim. From their vantage point in Aleppo they recently wrote to President Obama and pleaded with him to “Send us your prayers, not your bombs”.

According to the news reports this morning the G20 summit will be dominated by Syria, and so it should be. It is probable that had the G20 been held at the beginning of August that Syria would not have been much more than an important footnote. This timing gives these leaders the opportunity to show what the G20 and in turn the UN could do in a new 21st Century context. After the disaster of Iran and Afghanistan, could Syria be a place where the stench of 100,000 dead bodies and sight of many more injured Syrians finally provoke these world leaders to act in a new way. Not to supply or fire any more weapons, but to work together to bring the bloodshed to an end in Syria and elsewhere. If the normal processes follow, we can expect very little, I am confident that if it was possible to organise a brief Skype call between the Trappist Nuns and World Leaders, that the outcome would be very different.