All Saints Church – King’s Lynn

I have been sitting here thinking, which is not rare for me; sometimes I wonder whether I think too much. I wonder if that is possible, thinking too much?

It’s November 5^th, I can hear the fireworks exploding in the distance.  It is a strange custom; I doubt that many people ever think about the origins of it all, well, at least until their money has gone up in smoke! As a teenager I wouldn’t go to bonfire parties, because I disagreed with the sentiments of the day.

Each time I hear an explosion, all I can think of is the English Catholics who died horrible deaths – for what?  Simply, because a nation denied them the right to believe and think as they did.  Mind you, sitting here, listening to the sound of ‘burning money’, I suppose it could be worse, I could live in Lewes, in Sussex, where for centuries a whole community has, thoughtlessly or thoughtfully, celebrated ‘Bonfire Night’. 

I wonder, “Is there a limit to people’s freedom of thought – their right to express their thoughts, whether we agree with them or not?”  November 5th seems, to me, like an eternal comment upon this question – and really, it is nothing more than a thoughtless remembrance – a past memory of the ‘rights’ of some to curtail  and contain the freedom of others – all in God’s name, of course.  The truth is, even if people stopped to think … it wouldn’t change anything …