Good and evil are relative to the position in which you are standing. What is good for one is evil for the other. And you play your part, not withdrawing from the world when you realise how horrible it is,but seeing that this horrible is simply the foreground of a wonder:a mysterium tremendum.

“All life is sorrowful” is the first Buddhist saying, and so it is. It wouldn’t be life if there were not temporality involved, which is sorrow-loss, loss, loss. You’ve got to say yes to life and see it as magnificent this way; for this is surely the way God intended it.
No one believes that there was anybody who intended it, but this is the way it is. James Joyce has a memorable line: “History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.” And the way to awake from it is not to be afraid, and to recognize that all of this, as it is, is a manifestation of the horrendous power that is of all creation. The ends of things are always painful. But pain is part of there being a world at all.

That is not the necessary conclusion to draw. You could say, “I will participate in this life, I will join the army, I will go to war,” and so forth.

“I will participate in the game. It is a wonderful. wonderful opera-except that it hurts.”

Affirmation is difficult. We always affirm with conditions.I affirm the world on condition that it gets to be the way Santa Claus told me it ought to be. But affirming it the way it is that’s the hard thing, and that is what rituals are about. You can participate joyfully in a sarrowful world.