By Andrea Hopkins

BLACKSBURG, Va, April 22 (Reuters) - The United Methodist Church in this grief-stricken town offered prayers on Sunday for those killed last week in the massacre of 32 people just blocks away at Virginia Tech.

Church leaders also organized more practical comfort: grandmothers were called on to bake cookies and package them, four to a bag, to be handed out to students on campus as they return to class on Monday.

"We cannot yet fully comprehend what has happened and we will never understand it," the Rev. Reginald Tuck told churchgoers who packed the pews, some weeping quietly through his sermon.

Photos of the 32 victims of gunman Seung-Hui Cho, 23, sat on windowsills around the church and pink balloons from the funeral the day before of Austin Cloyd, 18, were tied near the altar. Tuck said Cloyd's mother had been with him, organizing a church dinner, when news reached them that there had been a shooting on campus.

Across the pretty college town of Blacksburg, churchgoers filed into sanctuaries for yet more prayer in the wake of the deadliest shooting spree in modern U.S. history, and the community prepared for the resumption of classes on Monday.

While more funerals are scheduled this week across the country and around the world for those killed -- who hailed from countries as diverse as Peru, Israel, Canada and India -- students said they were ready to go back to class.

"It would be wrong to just sit back and dwell on it," said Kimberly Mallon, 21, a biology and chemistry student due to graduate in May, as she read messages at one of many memorials that have sprung up across campus.

Mallon said the hardest class to return to will be the Monday course she shared with Ryan Clark, 22, one of the first students to be killed in the rampage.

"It's a real small class, about 15 of us. He wasn't there last week," Mallon said. By the time the morning class was under way on Monday, Clark was already dead but word of the shootings had not yet spread through campus.

QUESTIONS REMAIN

By all accounts, Virginia Tech was a large university with a small-town feel before Cho's rampage brought terror, trauma and hordes of media to the sprawling campus in the mountains of southwest Virginia.

While some 25,000 full-time students attend the school, the young people who chose Virginia Tech said it was a place where no one locked their doors and everyone felt safe.

"Before this, the top news was that 'Girls Gone Wild' was planning on coming to campus," said Amie Steele, 21, editor of the Collegiate Times newspaper.

Students reporters who looked forward to covering the raunchy roadshow's visit to Virginia's Bible Belt are now preparing a special edition commemorating the five teachers and 27 students killed by Cho, a mentally disturbed English major who killed himself after the shooting.

Questions remain about how Cho, who'd been investigated for two alleged stalking incidents in 2005 and treated for mental illness, was able to buy the two guns used in his rampage.

With just a couple of weeks left before the end of the school year, the university has said students who do not want to return to classes will be accommodated.

But while classes are optional, an atmosphere of stalwart defiance permeated the campus on Sunday and students said they expect the school will be ready for business on Monday.

"This is the only place I wanted to be and I think people will come back," Mallon said. "I think we'll be OK."

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