Princess Diana as idol.

It's been a long, strange summer in Britain marked by weird weather and violent deaths. First Gianni Versace and then Princess Diana.

Within hours of the news breaking here, spontaneous shrines to Diana began to sprout everywhere, even at her gym which is a block from my home. That overcast Sunday morning, I was also stopped in the street several times by young girls with armloads of flowers wanting directions to Kensington Palace.

By the next day, a few bouquets had turned into banks of flowers stretching as far as the eye could see. But while those around me were pouring out their grief, I felt no grief at all. "What's the matter with me?" I wondered. All I could feel was numbness and a sense of unreality, like a person underwater trying to surface for air.

You know the rest. You know how you felt about it too.

What are we to make of this? Was what most of us felt real grief?

"She was so caring, so loving, so warm," everyone said.

"She's in a place now where no one can touch her again," her brother Earl Spencer said bitterly.

"The woman's a saint, I tell you," others claimed.

"Christ-like" was the way a senior Anglican clergyman described her.

"I'm waiting for the first miracle and the first apparitions next week. So brace yourself," one editor told me with a wink.

A saint. Hmmm. . .

The centenary of the death of St. Therese of Lisieux, the Little Flower of Jesus, is September 30 of this year. She was only 24 when she died of tuberculosis at her Carmelite monastery in 1897. Yet word of her goodness spread far and wide and quickly. She was canonised in 1925. "I will spend my heaven doing good on earth," she promised. Anyone who has a true devotion to the Little Flower knows how admirably she has kept that promise though she had the simplest life imaginable.

While I don't claim to know what sainthood is exactly or how to recognise it, I have always found it difficult to believe that true sainthood is possible without devout religious practice.

Yes, there have been some truly great humanitarians in history whose lives have suggested that the milk of human kindness (and good PR) is enough; that one does not have to be religious to be saintly.

How else to explain Mahatma Ghandi or even Eva Peron?

But are they saints? What are we to make of the cults that have sprung up around them? And what is the meaning of leaving flowers, bottles of wine, candles and even teddy bears at palace gates? What's going on? Does no one find a teddy bear a bizarre way of commemorating three horrific deaths in a Paris tunnel?

While such practises are sentimental and sweet, they are also decidedly pagan, a reversion to making offerings to the god of the underworld. What's more, they do nothing to assuage real grief which is designed to bring man closer to God. Instead, God, the author of all life, is bypassed, and the loved one becomes an idol. That's what the verb "idolise" means.

Poor Diana.

While no one can judge her level of personal sainthood, anyone with eyes to see sensed in recent years that her life was fragile, doomed, hurling like a speeding car towards disaster.

"There was something about her which was out of joint, out of kilter," wrote British journalist Andrew Wilson two days after her death. "The contrasts in her nature were technicoloured and violent. All the cliches about her were true. She was both an almost saint-like conduit of healing, life, joy and peace, not merely to the sick and maimed but to everyone who saw her in the news and read about her. At the same time, there was a darker side. No need to dwell on it today but we all know it was there. She had something about her which was uncontrolled and demons as well as angels can use that conduit."

That's the problem with icons.

They are just people. Yet we invest them with the godlike power to fascinate, obsess and bewitch us. Then, in the confusion, illusion and even hysteria that follows, we begin to believe they are gods.

Which is exactly why we need a deep religious belief in God, true God, to keep things in perspective and to keep us away from madness and close to the truth.

The difference between a secular saint and the genuine article such as St. Therese is fundamental. It's this: the life of the true saint always points away from self and towards God, like a finger to the sky, like a steeple atop a church. By contrast, secular sainthood transforms a person into an object of veneration rather than God, and the glory that is rightfully God's is poured out on them.

No matter how many images are mounted and memorials to good works are built, however, the truth does not change.

Despite the pantheons of secular saints erected throughout history, there is only one unbreakable God. And none of these is Him.

Even so, it always hurts when an idol is smashed. It can leave you in pieces.

Paula Adamick reports from London, England.