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It’s hard to find a nicer place to be in London at sunset than at the top of Primrose Hill on a summer’s evening. Picnickers and dog walkers; joggers and sight-seers cluster towards the crest of the hill from which you can see the sun picking out by turns the famous landmarks from Canary Wharf to the London Eye. If you’re lucky, as I was whilst visiting London this week, the moon will rise and add its lustre to the scene. My walk back from Primrose Hill, that night, took me through some of the most exclusive residential streets in London, yet only yards away the towers of the Chalcots estate were looming. In them, only one or two lights showed, the residents having been evacuated more than three weeks ago, following the discovery of the same cladding as that used on the Grenfell Tower. As we walked a friend recounted to me the distressing incident she’d witnessed in which an evacuated young woman in crisis was accosting dog walkers asking for help to reach her temporary accommodation far away in Richmond. Crisis is a word that many have associated with the Grenfell Tower disaster. And in the immediate aftermath of a such a critical incident, people rush to help. Yet the word crisis in the Christian scriptures is used not so much to speak of disasters as of moments of truth. A crisis brings a shock judgement in which we are able to see ourselves and our world more clearly than before. It happens in a moment, but it sheds its piercing light upon a whole world, and it demands a response. One month on and the Grenfell Tower continues to make the news because it’s still opening up to us uncomfortable truths about our common life, revealing in the last few weeks: councillors who have never been in tower blocks; combustable materials that release cyanide gas; charity board members in the housing sector stepping down in light of apparent conflicts of interest; fraudulent crowd funding on social media; and now, according to a local doctor, inadequate provision for the treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder amongst survivors and witnesses. In the writings of St John in the New Testament God is described as light. But when light comes into the world - however you interpret it - its presence separates people into those who welcome it, however painful the truths it reveals, and those who shrink away because their motivations and actions do not bear scrutiny. In the face of the unfolding picture revealed by the Grenfell Tower disaster it’s hard not to be disgusted with our public life and to want to turn away from the light it shines on us all, but as I returned to picnic on Primrose Hill this weekend I was reminded of the Great Get Together in memory of MP Jo Cox and of her tireless work to reveal and address the systemic problems of our society. Perhaps, as the news rolls on, this disaster may yet convict more of us that we need to commit ourselves to work - through local councils, in boardrooms and in national politics - to deal with the long term issues upon which this moment of judgement continues to shed light.