Plenary, 05 Sep 2001
Meeting date: Wednesday, September 5, 2001
Official Report
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Time for Reflection
We welcome to lead our time for reflection today the author and theologian Elizabeth Templeton.
Mrs Elizabeth Templeton (Author and Theologian):
Beginnings are both wonderful and stressful. They are wonderful because they promise new possibilities and the chance of a fresh start. They are also times that can burden us, because we know how many new beginnings end up ploughing the same old weary furrows as before. Scotland's annual ritual of making new year resolutions is followed by peaks in the counselling professions' agendas as people fail to do whatever it was: give up smoking, spend more time with their wives and children, keep up their piano practice, or find out more about how their colleagues tick.
I imagine that the start of a parliamentary year holds a similar ambivalence. Can the hopes and opportunities of this still infant Parliament be sustained, not only in public expectation—which is so ignorant of the graft of political life and so quick to follow bad media leads of cynicism and scapegoating—but, more important, in your own holding of the balance between realism and vision? Politicians who cannot dream out loud have lost something, but politicians who can only dream, without the disciplines of detailed economic, sociological and political expertise, will dream in vain.
Last week I was involved in a conference of teachers of religious education from all over Europe. Some were Christian, a few were Muslim, and an unspecified number were humanist, agnostic or atheist. At one point, we were invited to play a values game. On a pyramid-shaped board there was a range of options, which ran from "of absolute value" at the top through "earth-shatteringly valuable", "extremely valuable", "valuable", "fairly valuable", "not entirely worthless" and then, below the base of the pyramid, a dustbin. In groups of six we worked through a pile of cards: justice, wealth, success, freedom, love, beauty, self-satisfaction, tolerance and many more. We took turns to place the card in our hand somewhere on the pyramid, but if another card was already in that space, we had to take two turns—one to demote the value that was there, and the other to replace it with the one that we valued more.
Perhaps that is a game worth playing. Which three values would be at the top of your pyramid of this Parliament's political life? Honesty? Peace? Power? Hope? Which other values would you demote to prioritise those? Should humility have a place in public life? Is integrity compatible with the pressures of presentability? Is there a way of resisting the corporate image of professional politicians, as one dictionary definition sadly puts it, as "men"—sic—"of artifice and cunning"? Pericles would turn in his grave, and most of us who know anyone in the world of professional politics find that stereotype to be an unworthy caricature. I suspect that the clash of such values is what lies behind much nitty-gritty political debate. Perhaps that deserves a moment of reflection.
Even within my Christian tradition, there is no consensus about the top values. Faith, hope and charity are big words, but can be code to many people. At the beginning of a new session, I wish you the energy to keep asking such basic questions of one another, self-forgiveness for being part of the compromised human condition, and the ability to refuse to accept that how things are is how they are bound to be.