Plenary, 07 Sep 2004

Meeting date: Tuesday, September 7, 2004

Official Report 585KB pdf

---

Time for Reflection

Welcome to Holyrood. Welcome to the new Scots Parliament. Our first item of business this morning is time for reflection, which is led by one of our new neighbours—the Rev Charles Robertson, minister of the Canongate kirk.

Thank you for your welcome. I, in turn, welcome you all to the parish of Canongate, where I hope that you will soon feel settled and happy.

You meet in new buildings, on a site that is already rich with history. This place has supported human activity from archaeological times until now. It has provided a town house for the Queensberry family; a shelter for wounded officers of the Jacobite army that fought at Prestonpans; a military barracks in the early 19th century; an isolation hospital for the city and district of Edinburgh during outbreaks of cholera; the venue for the first annual show of the Royal Highland and Agricultural Society of Scotland; a house of refuge and a soup kitchen for the destitute; and Scotland's largest independent geriatric hospital—not to mention a profusion of well-known and much-loved breweries.

Your new buildings succeed all that and bring their own history with them, constructed as they are from metals hidden deep since the dawn of time, from rocks slow forming through countless ages and from trees spanning the centuries with strength and beauty.

Human history is also already part of the buildings, for all sorts of people have been involved in the building of them—visionaries with the power to make their vision real; planners with the foresight to enable community to develop; artists with eyes and minds to see and fashion beauty; craftsmen with mastery over wood and iron and stone; and builders with perseverance that discounts even the vagaries of our weather.

They have all played their part to bring us here today into this place of wonder as well as of work, to a complex of buildings that will neither pall nor bore, in a setting that joins the tangible with the intangible. The kaleidoscope of reflections that pass across the glass panels lining the walls of the chamber, the complexity and sophistication of the engineering marvel of the roof, the majestic sweep of the magnificent staircase that brings you here, or any one of the other many-splendoured things that makes this place the unique and precious thing that it is—the beauty of each and all of those will inspire and uplift you as, from this day forward, you go about your business in this place.

So today has grown out of yesterday and out of all the days that went to make yesterday what it was. And yet today is a new day—the newest thing in God's creation, the fruit of God's long patience and the gift of God's strong love. Here, in this new place with all its beauty, it is fitting that we lay no busy fingers on this new day with all its history until first, in the quiet, we take time for reflection.

What will we add to the history of this place? How can we enhance its beauty? Perhaps by simply taking to heart the words that we will walk over every time we come here—the words of St Paul that are carved on the forecourt at the entrance to Queensberry House:

"Gin I speak wi the tungs
o men an angels
but hae nae luve i my hairt
I am no nane better
nor dunnerin bress
or a ringing cymbal."

This place, of all places, is surely not the place for dunnerin bress or ringing cymbals. [Applause.]