Karl Jung, one of the fathers of modern psychology, said, ‘People from all civilized countries of the earth have consulted me. I have treated many hundreds of patients. Among all my patients in the second half of life – that is to say, over thirty-five – there has not been one whose problem in the last resort was not that of finding a religious outlook on life. It is safe to say that every one of them fell ill because he had lost that which the living religions of every age have given to their followers, and none of them has been really healed who did not regain his religious outlook.’
It’s a profound observation from one of the greatest behavioural scientists, reminding us that, as Saint Augustine observed a millennium and a half ago, there is still that ‘God-shaped hole’ in every human heart.