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Gunpowder Plot Politics

I wonder whether they will be burning an effigy of the pope in Lewes tonight? This blog deliberately tries to avoid any comment on "political" events because there are many with better information and keener insight; but 5 November is a good day for recalling a time when Catholics in England were treated with suspicion and hostility. It makes one think about people who, today, suffer the same fate for their religious or political beliefs. Christians in the Near East do not have a comfortable existence; lovers of democracy in Burma and Pakistan, to name just two countries, do not have a comfortable existence. And whatever one's gripes or grumbles about Monday morning, there are people in the Congo, Darfur, Mexico, so many places, for whom today will bring pain and suffering of an intensity and bleakness most of us will never experience. Let us pray for them all and do what we can to help. The thought that our work today might just ease the plight of some unknown brother or sister elsewhere in the world should transform the day. Almsgiving is always better than gunpowder.