Hope.

Whatever the disasters that love may cause, we should suggest, love, judged in itself and without regard to contingencies, is a human good – perhaps the greatest of human goods. The important thing is to learn to love rightly and in the right frame of mind. Then the disasters, if they come, come as accidents and not by necessity. That is the response that should be made on behalf of religion too. Of course religion can lead to disasters, like the Thirty Years War. Of course people can believe in false gods and attach themselves to evil rituals. But that does not alter the fact that people have a need for reconciliation and forgiveness and that they find these things through allowing into their lives the light that is cast by sacred things. By opening ourselves to the sacred we are also constructing a community, so that the meanings and values that we find are shared with others. A religious community is not a scientific community. It contains idiocy, prejudice, ignorance and stupidity in all the proportions that these are displayed by mankind as a whole. But that is its great virtue: it can draw people, whatever their talents and intellectual powers, into a shared apprehension of their condition. It can teach humility and justice, and remind the one with power, knowledge, wealth or artistic talent, that he is the equal of the one beside him in the moment of worship, however ignorant, weak or sinful that person might be. And to both of them it offers hope.

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