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Good Morning. On the 7th May 1913, a virger was going about his duties in the quire at St Paul’s Cathedral, when he heard a loud ticking from underneath the Bishop’s throne. On further investigation, he found a bomb with a clock and battery attached, wrapped in a tract from the Suffragettes. With characteristic quick thinking, he put it in a bucket of water and disarmed it. When I walk past the Bishop’s throne in the Cathedral, as I do on a regular basis, I often think about the bomb and what drove someone to put it there. As a current member of the Chapter of St Paul’s I find myself recoiling in horror at the thought of what might have happened that day, though there is a theory that the bomb was designed not to explode because otherwise no one would have known that it came from the Suffragettes. Live or not, the action is inexcusable then or now. But as I pass the spot where it was placed, I also think about the passion that fueled the suffrage movement. It is quite hard, these days, to comprehend how vehemently people fought for the right to vote but they did, and we live with the privilege that they won. I have two daughters and every year from the age of about five, I used to give them a lecture on the importance of voting. I knew my work was done when, a few years ago I declared myself too tired to go out to vote after a long day’s work and my youngest daughter gave me the lecture in return. I rose, weary or not, and went to vote – with considerable joy in my heart. Tomorrow up and down the country are local elections for council seats, Mayors and Police Commissioners and – while there is no compulsion on anyone to vote -I will be there, at my local polling station, placing my vote. In the Hebrew Scriptures, the prophet Jeremiah spoke to the people of God who had been displaced from their homes and taken hundreds of miles away to Babylon. We might have expected him to say ‘don’t make yourselves at home, this won’t last long’ but he didn’t. Instead he said, ‘Seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you.’ If that was true for them, how much more is it true for us? We can seek the welfare, the wholeness, of the places where we live in all sorts of different ways, but tomorrow I’ll be doing it by voting.
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