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Good morning. When the early Christian fathers were commending the single life, they often waxed lyrical on the woes of marriage. Sometimes – let’s be honest – these lamentations were frankly misogynistic. But sometimes they show genuine insight and sympathy. So it is that Gregory of Nyssa, a married man writing around 370 a.d., warns would-be parents with some feeling of the anxieties which parents have for the well being of their offspring. He mentions in particular the special tenderness of a mother, whereby, as he puts it, ‘she feels all that is happening’ to her children. For all that the world has changed beyond anything he could have guessed at nearly 17 hundred years ago, there is sadly a timeless truth to Gregory’s warnings, particularly in relation to that terrible combination of love and impotence which can be a parent’s lot in relation to a sick child. In the case of Alfie Evans, as in the case of Charlie Gard last year, we certainly feel moved by the sufferings of the young child, but perhaps doubly moved by the plight of parents who have to stand by the bedside as their child’s condition worsens, and any hope of recovery seems to disappear. If Gregory’s warnings about the pain of parenthood is one which has not been rendered redundant by the passage of years, his remedy, however, seems a step too far. Christians have had a variety of reasons for choosing a celibate life, but choosing it on account of the sometimes excruciating pain of parental responsibility would surely be a mistake. That one may come, through the gift of a child, to feel another’s pain as one’s own – indeed to feel it so strongly that one might even wish it were one’s own – cannot be treated simply as a misfortune to be avoided. Instead we surely want to recognise that the coming to birth of such sentiments, alongside the birth of a child, is a matter of moral enlargement and growth for most of us. Of course, none of us wants to see a child suffer – and as a parent of two youngsters myself, I can barely imagine the torment which Alfie Evans’ parents are enduring. But the feelings of love and sympathy which children elicit in those who care for them, are feelings we can only wish to see widened, not avoided. Our humanity is best expressed not by protecting ourselves against the risk of this sort of pain, but by allowing ourselves to be exposed to it more widely. The Book of Common Prayer has a service to be used after childbirth and it gives a choice of psalms to be recited. One psalm proclaims that ‘children are a gift that cometh of the Lord’; the other, presumably to be used when a child had died at birth, declares that ‘the snares of death compassed me round about . . . I found trouble and heaviness’. There is choice of psalms - but it is only taken together that the two psalms tell us the whole story, that the birth of a child extends our capacity to feel pain and to experience trouble and heaviness, but that this enlargement of our sympathies and vulnerabilities, excruciating as it may sometimes be, really is a gift from God.