Bursting of the Chinese growth bubble, the migration crisis, IS militants blow up the Temple of Baalshamin in Palmyra, live on TV a disaffected employee shoots a newsreader dead. How can we remedy this chaos and misery? Or how can we pray about it? At one level there are obvious political solutions: the economic cycle is known to involve boom and bust, yet governments kid themselves they can get round it. There is a solution to migration, but it would mean a change of life style for most of us and we don’t like it. As for politically organised Islamic fundamentalism in and around Syria: this is in our terms so anarchic and off the Richter Scale that it’s hard to see how to counter it effectively. And America is crying out for new, restrictive gun laws.

As religious people and Christians our instinct is to pray for a miraculous solution to these threats to civilisation, which is pretty well what we do in the intercessions in church each week. Another more effective approach in my experience is to face the challenge penitentially by accepting before God that we are all implicated in these failures. Contentment doesn’t depend on GNP or constant growth or electric gates around your property. It is more elusive than that and has to do with values that transcend the obviously materialistic. This is what St Paul was going on about when he contrasted the spirit and the flesh. That wasn’t about sex, but the contrast between temporal and eternal values, between the commercial and the morally valuable. These terrible events will shake us all up.