In the film “The Quest for the Holy Grail” an excited throng bring a woman to their village leader claiming that she is a witch and that she ought to be burnt. Her ‘trial’ goes like this.“How do you know she is a witch?” “She looks like one!”“They dressed me up like this” comes the defence from the unfortunate woman whose life expectancy is diminishing by the second.The crowd responds “Well… we might have done the nose… and… the hat… But she is a witch!”“So what makes you think she is a witch?”“Well, she turned me into a newt”“A newt?”“Well… I got better again … but she is a witch” The whole scene is funny because of the ludicrous way in which the woman is set up and ‘tried’. But there is a darker side to it. In troubled times, it is hideously easy to look for someone to be the focus of our angst and worry. There is a temptation to publicly or privately, think less of others simply because we are not well informed of their culture, their way of life, their thinking. They might dress differently, speak differently or they might come from a different nation. They might be a political, spiritual, or sporting leader who has disappointed and whose faults are shown in the unforgiving glare of the television. I wonder which of us could survive such searing, relentless investigation and publicity? The trick is to see the person as a person, not a witch. In these irksome times, we can choose to be a fearful mob dressing others with our own preconceptions and prejudices, (re the hat and the nose) or we can take the time to discover how others can be quite magnificent and in so doing bring about our own healing.