AUBURN – To Marta Greenwood, no object of prayer is too big.

Prayer can make peace between neighbors, end vandalism in the community or end the war in Iraq, said the 50-something woman, raised in Iran and educated in London.

“It starts with me,” Greenwood said. “If I can find that inner stillness, that inner peace, then that is a prayer I can give out to the world.”

Giving in to the fear of terrorism is the first mistake, she said.

In her head, she rewrites every headline she reads about the war, replacing “terror” with “safety,” and “hate” with “love.”

Stubbornly positive, smiling throughout an interview in the lobby of Auburn’s Hilton Garden Inn, Greenwood chooses to be optimistic, she said.

Not that she’s always had reason to be.

She grew up in a medical mission in the Iranian city of Isfahan. Her parents were Muslim-born but had converted to Christianity, a rarity in Iran.

She was allowed little contact with people outside her home.

“All I knew of the outside world was through books, because it was such a restrictive upbringing,” she said.

Then, when she was 19, her parents sent her to London, where she studied to be a nurse and midwife.

“You know what happens to a spring when you squash it down and let it loose?” she said. “When my feet touched the ground at Heathrow Airport, oh boy.”

She had intended to stay in England only long enough to finish school. Instead, she married an Englishman, Nicholas Greenwood.

She returned to Iran only once, five years after she left. Her husband went along. The Shah was still in power.

“I’d love to go back again,” she said. The dangers would be too great, though. “I’m waiting to jump in there and see what it’s like.”

Greenwood went to work as a delivery ward supervisor in Guy’s Hospital in London’s East End. She had two daughters.

She was skeptical about God until she grew sick.

In the late 80s, she discovered a growth. Surgery followed.

“I thought that’s the only way people got cured,” she said. “I didn’t get better.”

But two years later, she read, “Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures,” by Mary Baker Eddy, the founder of the Church of Christ, Scientist.

She vowed to stay alive when her daughters came to visit her bedside one day. And her prayers healed her, she said.

By the late 1990s, Greenwood became a lecturer. She gives seminars on healing. And in the days after the July 7, 2005, London bombings, in which 52 people died and 700 others were hurt in the Underground subway, Greenwood began lecturing on terrorism..

She teaches people to recreate newspaper headlines, replacing bad news with good. And she talks about her daily prayers. For people who are not Christians, she replaces prayer with love.

Love can end the war, she said.

“It’s a catalyst that you’re putting there, for people to come together and find meeting points,” she said.