Plenary, 02 Feb 2005

Meeting date: Wednesday, February 2, 2005

Official Report 473KB pdf

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Time for Reflection

Good afternoon. The first item of business is time for reflection. Our leader for time for reflection today is Dr Alison Elliot, the moderator of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland.

I know that this is an anxious day for many of us in Scotland. Pope John Paul is someone who inspires great affection, particularly among the Roman Catholic community. He is not just a distant leader, but a personal father to them, and our thoughts and prayers are with them now. I am sure that we are all glad to hear that his condition is stable. We pray that he will recover from his present infection.

Building is turning out to be a theme of this year for me, as it is for the Parliament. It is a pleasure to be in this fine building again. Large public buildings give shape to the landscape and are an important focus for community, whether the building is a parliament, a palace or a church. Of course, we can become seduced by our buildings into believing that they are more important than what goes on inside them. We can be seduced into forgetting that they are only a temporary shelter from the buffeting winds of the life of the rest of the community that we serve. We can become imprisoned inside them. Figuratively, we often construct walls that imprison others: walls of poverty, walls of loneliness, walls of stigma. Part of civic and political responsibility is the task of breaking down those walls.

Broken walls have also been a powerful image this year, though those walls have been violently torn apart, not constructively dismantled. In Sri Lanka, I saw great jagged slabs of torn concrete propped up against palm trees or littering fields. We were there when the clean-up operation was well under way and some people were getting on with thatching their houses again. They have a long way to go. They will have to rebuild not just their homes, but their livelihoods, their confidence and their communities. Boats and nets have been destroyed, but so too has the nerve of the fishing communities. They no longer trust the sea, which they had thought of as their mother. In Colombo, we passed a small group of people who were silently staring out to the ocean, as if to reconnect with it. The communities have become distorted, with the tsunami cutting a swathe through them and showing no favours except that, as usual, the small and the weak were taken first.

One might have thought that the enduring story would be of overwhelming physical force and of rapid material reconstruction; however, it is the human story that endures—a story that raises spiritual questions as well. It is a story of fractured communities struggling to rebuild themselves, of resilience and tireless commitment, and of compassion and generosity that surprises itself. It should mean that things will not be the same again, even at this distance, because people all round the world have been touched deeply by the tragedy. It brings home to us how fragile we and our enterprises are and it sets a different yardstick against which to measure what is important in life. The memory of those pictures is not going to fade quickly. It shows just how generous the people of Scotland can be. It shows that distance need not be a barrier to human sympathy. Cities and communities right across Scotland have been finding ways of making that sympathy tangible and lasting. Let us hope that we hold on to that commitment and connectedness and that, in the months ahead, we manage to build more enduring ways of caring for the vulnerable and the weak across this shrinking world.