Meeting of the Parliament

Meeting date: Tuesday, December 10, 2013

Official Report 851KB pdf

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Time for Reflection

Good afternoon. The first item of business this afternoon is time for reflection. Our time for reflection leader is the Most Reverend Leo Cushley, the Archbishop of St Andrews and Edinburgh.

Presiding Officer, dear friends, I am grateful for this opportunity to address this distinguished group of representatives in our nation’s ancient capital. I have not lived in Scotland for a long time, so it is a wonderful thing to return, to have the chance to stand here in our new Parliament and to consider all that has been achieved here in so short a time.

We hear it said that life is sacred without thinking about it too much, but it remains impressed upon how we relate to each other as a society, and that is why it is in the bedrock of the laws of our country. When we look at Scots law, we can see the various origins and influences on it, and one of them is Christianity. Of course, that pleases me as a Christian, not because it makes the law biased in my favour but because I know that Christians start from the premise that all life is sacred, irrespective of creed or any other accidentals, and because they believe—as many do—that all creation starts in some way in God.

Law and legislation appear naturally, too. Wherever there are two or three people in one place, there is necessarily interrelationship and interaction, there are rules of conduct, and there springs up a way of behaving that is agreed on. Those are the beginnings of human society, and human society naturally develops rules of conduct. Those become human laws that are useful for a season but, inevitably, are occasionally in need of reform. Human laws are of course imperfect, just as we ourselves are fragile and imperfect.

Until recent times, all law in our country, to some degree, reflected our relationship with God and our relationship with our fellow human beings, including our own selves. If our human laws failed in either of those dimensions, the argument went that they would fail to promote the common good that all law must surely strive to uphold. By contrast, laws that passed those two tests stood the test of time, for the good of the whole community, even for non-believers.

Law that truly serves the common good will surely encourage us to respect ourselves and to love our neighbours. Without those two elements, our society would be, in the Christian view, closed in on itself and would become a contradiction in terms—individuals with little or no connection to the commonweal.

And so I would like to pray for those who make Scotland’s laws, that the Lord may bless them with justice and temperance, with courage and prudence. And may all Scots and the strangers who live among us be blessed on the way to a more harmonious peace and a more balanced prosperity in our beloved country.

Amen.