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After the bank holiday weekend and the parliamentary recess, today might feel like a return to normality; welcome or not. In central London traffic is running once again around Oxford Circus and down Piccadilly where I live now that the Extinction Rebellion protests have moved. Public conversations temporarily suspended while politicians took a break will now resume and Brexit will once again fill the airwaves. But for the families of the 310 people killed in attacks on churches and hotels in Sri Lanka on Sunday, normality will never be resumed. As it will not be for the relatives of Muslim worshippers killed at prayer in New Zealand a month ago. When I attended a Holocaust Memorial Day service at a London synagogue recently, I was struck by the very high level of security. Human beings are vulnerable in different ways at different times, but gathering in a public place to pray it seems is one of them. These heartbreaking attacks, and the grief and insecurity they cause, raise questions about the place of the public practice of religion in a contemporary world. The controversy over the speed with which a billion Euros has been raised for Notre Dame has also spoken into this debate in a different way. In a secularised and wealthy Europe, the question has been put sharply regarding the relative value we place on buildings and people. A visiting imam said in our church last week that a place of worship is in itself a place that stands for peace, where our common humanity is celebrated in the light of the presence of God. Of course this isn’t always played out in practice; religious people are just as guilty as anyone else of allowing division or exclusion. And it’s always moving when people who might not feel so at home in religious buildings create their own spaces for public vigils or acts of remembrance. But, speaking as a Christian, in a UK that has more churches than pubs and more churches than supermarkets or banks; I want to suggest that our places of public worship are fundamental, not only to the history and culture of our society but as a permanent visible invitation to all people to lift our eyes beyond our day to day horizon and find the depth of hope and courage of which human beings are so evidently capable. And even on the day when it seems we’re back to work and normality is resuming, an invitation to practise the kind of faith that Christians have just been reflecting on in Holy Week; faith which stubbornly, freely resists violence and division, by continuing to gather to pray, and by doing so, expresses a renewed determination to make the world a more just and beautiful place.