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Good morning. A cartoon was published this week showing a man getting dressed and turning to his wife to say “Which mask goes best with this tie?” Of course most of us are not concerned to make a fashion statement with our masks, we just want others and ourselves to be kept safe. It is a rather different role for masks than has been the case for most of human history. From the chorus in Greek Tragedy, through the masked balls in 16th century Venice, to children putting on ghoulish masks at Halloween they have been used to present an outward face to the world whilst hiding the real one. And that’s how we use the word in everyday speech. We talk about someone’s mask slipping-the front they have been putting on suddenly dropping away and revealing what lies behind. However, all of us, have masks of one kind or another, that is, different faces we put on for the world depending on the different roles we adopt. And this is for much of the time essential. We want a doctor or a shop assistant or a computer engineer to relate to us in a professional manner. We don’t want them to overshare their private life. But there are some intimate relationships when the masks are deliberately set aside and what goes on inside is shown, and perhaps, unburdened. This week my attention was caught by a church in Cologne which had an innovative priest who tried to relate modern art to the Christian faith. On one occasion he took away all the religious imagery from a spacious chapel and simply had written right across it the words ‘Ich habe angst’. I am afraid, literally I have fear. I found it starkly moving and relevant. And I could not help contrasting it with the words of Tracey Emin, written in her own hand in Liverpool’s Anglican Cathedral. ‘ I felt you and I knew you loved me’. Equally powerful, but somehow those words in the German church seemed just right for now. In a world so full of anxiety about Covid and its effects, with an America so bitterly divided what seems needed to me is a simple statement of our feelings to the one before whom all masks are down. That’s why I love the psalms, which mean as much to Christians as they do to Jews. All our feelings are laid bare, our fear, our sadness, our anger- and they are not just an individual outpouring but, a cry of the whole of humanity.