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Good morning. I think many people are conscious of a strange, uneasy disjunction in their lives at the moment. On the one hand we are quietly getting on with what we have to do. On the other hand every time we open our mind and heart to what is happening elsewhere, we are conscious of a nightmare world and a society full of anguish and tension. W.H. Auden caught this contrast in a poem he wrote about a painting he had seen. It made him think how right that painter was to understand that suffering always take place, as he put it “while someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along.” But we do have to get on with the ordinary things of our everyday lives and yesterday parliament did just that, shell shocked and in a sombre mood though it was. After the opening by the Queen in the morning, formal business began in the afternoon, with a minute’s silence for all who died in the fire in Grenfell tower or were killed as a result of a terrorist atrocity. The chamber was crowded and the prayers which followed seemed particularly relevant and urgent. From one point of view these prayers were just words of course, lovely words, but words. Yet words in prayer at least express what the poet Philip Larkin once identified as the surprise of finding a hunger in oneself to be more serious. The situation we find ourselves in at the moment when everything seems such a mess, when there is so much uncertainty and anxiety around, as well as downright pain, can lead to two reactions. We can carry on as before - or we can dig deeply in to that more serious side and resolve to bring something good out of what is happening. England in the 17th century had a terrible civil war. One of the people who suffered was Robert Shirley, who was imprisoned in the tower and who died shortly after. Over the door of Staunton Harold Church in Leicestershire there is an inscription which reads “In the yeare 1653 when all things sacred were throughout ye nation either demollisht or profaned Sir Robert Shirley Baronet Founded this Church whose singular praise it is to have done the best things in ye worst times And hoped them in the most calamitous.” It’s a memorial Members of Parliament and all of us could envy - to do the best things in the worst times and to hope them in the most calamitous.