The Hibbert Assembly
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Suggestions
for a secondary school asssembly |
We think of prisoners as
people who have done something very wrong. Every day you can read in a
newspaper, or see on the television news, reports of people being sent
to prison for serious crimes. |
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But sometimes entirely innocent
people are held as prisoners. This is usually for what we can class as
political reasons. People are kidnapped and held as hostages because
their captors think they can use them in their negotations for what they
want. Not very long ago Brian Keenan, John McCarthy and Terry Waite were
held imprisoned |
Sometimes these political prisoners are treated very
cruelly by their captors. They can be chained up in darkened rooms,
given very little food, and deprived of anything to occupy their time -
even books (though some of you may not regard that as punishment!).
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Sometimes, too, political prisoners are tortured. |
Today is a special day which marks the death in
captivity of a political prisoner almost 300 years ago. He was Guru
Arjan, a Sikh teacher and, like many other political prisoners, a good
man, indeed a holy man. Guru Arjan was the fifth of the Sikh gurus, or
spiritual teachers. He founded a great Sikh temple in Amritsar and he
collected with writings of earlier gurus to create the Sikh holy book,
the Guru Granth Sahib. Guru Arjan believed in many of the things we
believe in today, like equality, and freedom of speech and worship. But
the Moghul, the ruler of the state where Guru Arjan lived, thought that
the Guru's ideas were a threat to his country, which had a strict caste
system where people were divided into social classes. |
So Guru Arjan was imprisoned and
tortured. He was compelled to sit on a metal platform above a great
fire. Then he was thrown into boiling water. He showed great courage in
bearing the terrible pain calmly, turning his thoughts to God instead of
to his suffering. |
And so Guru Arjan became the first Sikh martyr,
dying for his beliefs. And Sikhs commemorate his death today. |
(Teachers may then choose to read the Sikh prayer on
how to bear the unbearable, found amongst our hymns and other worship
material) |
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