Plenary, 03 Oct 2007
Meeting date: Wednesday, October 3, 2007
Official Report
385KB pdf
Time for Reflection
Good afternoon. Our time for reflection leader is the Rev Valerie Ott from Gatehouse of Fleet parish church. I also welcome, from Deaf Action, Nigel Ashbrook, who will be signing alongside the Rev Valerie Ott, and Roseanne Butler-Stoney, who will be signing in the public gallery, as part of learn to sign week.
The Rev Valerie Ott (Gatehouse of Fleet Parish Church):
It is a great pleasure for me to have been asked to come up from my parish of Gatehouse of Fleet, in bonnie Gallowa', to lead you in your time for reflection.
Until I moved to Gatehouse just over five and a half years ago, I had spent all my life amidst the hustle and bustle of urban landscapes. But in Gatehouse I discovered another world. It happened one afternoon during our first week in the manse, when I got fed up with unpacking the cardboard boxes that the removal men had stacked in the middle of our living room, and decided instead to set off to explore my new surroundings.
It was a glorious, sunny spring day. I wandered up the single-track road from the manse and soon found myself climbing a stile of old stone slabs over a moss-covered wall and taking a path that wound up the hillside. I followed the rugged track through a landscape of bracken and gorse, over the gnarled roots of old trees that had probably been there long before our manse was built. The path twisted over the hills, ever further from the village, and I suddenly became aware that I could see and hear no sign of human habitation. Stretching into the distance as far as the eye could see were green, rolling hills, rising here and there to the summits of bare granite crags. Stopping to listen, I could hear the song of the birds, the distant bleating of sheep, and the occasional rustling of a rabbit or a mouse in the undergrowth. There was no rumble of traffic, no human voice to mar my sense of wilderness and isolation.
In that moment I became aware, in a way I had never been in the town, of the awesomeness and majesty of the world that God has made. In that moment I realised why the psalmists of the Old Testament so often found their greatest inspiration in the glories of God's creation. They, too, had stood apart from the hurly-burly of daily life and taken the opportunity to reflect on the great universe that God spread before them in all its majestic power and beauty.
And there came into my mind a couple of lines penned by the Scottish-American poet Robert W Service:
"Have you tuned your soul to silence?
Heard the text that nature renders?"
Nature's text reminds us that, in our self-absorption and our concentration on the demands pressed so insistently upon us from every side, we can lose sight of the world that God has given us and ignore the landscape of creation in which he has placed us all.
So it is my prayer for all of you, in your busy lives here in Edinburgh, that you will indeed find the time to tune your soul to silence and hear the text that nature renders. And may God bless you in the work you do.