Meeting of the Parliament
Meeting date: Wednesday, March 10, 2010
Official Report
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Time for Reflection
Sister Isabel Smyth (Honorary Lecturer, Centre for Inter Faith Studies, Glasgow University and Secretary to the Catholic Bishops Committee for Inter Religious Dialogue)
This week we celebrate international women’s day, a day set aside to honour and celebrate the achievements of women. Today I would like to remember a woman whose life has, I think, a message for all of us.
That woman is Stella Reekie, a Church of Scotland deaconess who set up the International Flat in Glasgow and established the first interfaith group in Scotland, the Glasgow Sharing of Faiths.
As a former missionary to Pakistan, Stella worked in the 1950s with the new Scots, who had mostly come from India and Pakistan, helping them to integrate into their new surroundings. She realised how important it was to establish understanding and respect not just between cultures but between different faiths.
Behind her commitment to that work was her wartime experience. She had been present in the first days of the liberation of Belsen and had seen for herself the horror and destruction of human lives that can emerge from philosophies that judge one group to be superior to another or dehumanise people because they are different.
Perhaps the best tribute to Stella was at her funeral, when a Sikh friend said:
“For Christians Stella Reekie was a Christian but she was something more than that. She was above labels. For me, a Sikh, Stella was a Sikh because I could see Sikhism reflecting from her daily life.
To me she was like clear running water. If you pour it into the glass, it takes the shape of the glass. If you pour it into a flask, it takes the shape of the flask. She became the shape of what was needed at any time.”
That, I think, is the great lesson that we can learn from this amazing woman. So often we limit ourselves by our labels, whether they be religious, political, cultural or whatever. Those labels often confine the way that we look at things and prevent us from seeing the truth in other points of view. We can be so hampered by our labels that we are prevented from expressing the values that at heart are our motivation and the source of our commitment. In Scotland we are lucky to have the values that bind us together as a society spelled out on our mace: wisdom, justice, compassion and integrity.
Perhaps we can allow the memory of Stella Reekie to inspire us to work for those values so that we too can respond to the concerns of others and not curtail that by the labels we give ourselves.
Good afternoon. The first item of business is time for reflection. Our time for reflection leader today is Sister Isabel Smyth, an honorary lecturer at the centre for inter-faith studies, Glasgow university, and secretary to the Catholic Bishops Committee for Inter Religious Dialogue.