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Good morning. I was amused to read this week that the Beano Comic is marking 70 years of Dennis the Menace with great celebrations amongst his many followers. Ah happy was the day of the week it came out. I can still sense the eagerness with which I went to collect it and the special smell from the pile of Beanos and Dandys. And in those days each had a sale of some 2 million copies a week. The problem is that the sense of unalloyed delight which most of us will have had occasionally in childhood, if not from comics then something else, tends to fade or disappear as we grow older. Both Thomas Traherne and Wordsworth had a very intense sense of the joy of childhood but as Wordsworth put it Heaven lies about us in our infancy! Shades of the prison-house begin to close Upon the growing Boy, I believe that the contemporary focus on well-being is an attempt to recapture something of that childhood sense of pleasure. And it’s huge. The wellness industry is now said to be worth more than 3 trillion pounds a year worldwide. And it’s right that we should want to feel good about ourselves and good about the world. But there is a huge problem. All is not good with the world. Daily we are brought up short by news of suffering in the Yemen or Myanmar and countless other places of conflict or oppression. How can we hold together a sense of personal well being with sensitivity to the anguish of the world? It’s a dilemma which has troubled me most my adult life. It seems to me we need to go beyond well being into something else altogether. For a Christian this takes a particular form. Sunday is Passion Sunday when the church starts to focus on the fact that the Eternal One entered time and experienced human suffering, and as the French Mathematician and Philosopher Pascal put it, ‘Jesus is in agony until the end of the world.’ The dilemma is this. How can heaven be bliss if it is still open to human suffering? But how can it be perfect love if it is not? The only pointer to an answer that I can see is in the example of a loving family gathered round one of its members who is seriously ill or dying. There is no lesser awareness of the suffering, but there is such a sense of the love which unites them, something so precious in what joins them, that they feel taken into another dimension altogether. They go beyond well being into something more valuable still.