Meeting of the Parliament

Meeting date: Tuesday, December 11, 2012

Official Report 773KB 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 today is the Right Rev Gordon Mursell, author and former Bishop of Stafford.

When I retired, I started climbing the Munros. When I got to Braigh Coire Chruinn-bhalgain—which means the upland of the corrie of the round blisters—I realised that I would have to learn Gaelic if I was to stand any chance of being rescued if something terrible ever happened to me. So I am into the second year of the Ulpan Gaelic course at Castle Douglas.

Both the Munros and the Gaelic language—you do not need me to tell you this—are far more than just a part of Scottish heritage or culture; they are a part of our country’s spiritual DNA. Both offer us an alternative vision of reality, a different way of seeing things. The mountains do that by lifting you out of self, into a wider picture. No one could climb them without becoming aware not just of the beauty of the landscape but of their own littleness.

That is why language such as “bagging” or “conquering” the Munros is so inappropriate; we climb them as pilgrims, encountering something other than ourselves—something that, when paid attention to, has its own story to tell: of climate change and clearances; of safety for minorities fleeing persecution; of refuge for birds and migrant animals. They do not belong to landowners or hillwalkers or even human beings; they are free. When the great Scottish climber WH Murray was liberated after years of imprisonment by the Nazis, he said, “I had not once thought of myself as imprisoned. In my mind, I was on the mountains of Scotland, and had their freedom.”

In the Judaeo-Christian tradition to which I belong, mountains are not just signs of freedom. They keep us company. They inspire us to welcome the stranger, because on them we are all strangers in need of sustenance and shelter. They are not an escape from the world of politics and poverty; they inspire us to go back to it and change it for the better. Jesus went “up the mountain” to give his teaching—that is why it is called the “Sermon on the Mount”—because you can see further from up there; and the radical reversal of this world’s values that he taught inspires us still because, in the same spirit as the Gaelic language and the Munros, they offer us an alternative vision of how things could be. I am no good at pronouncing this, but I shall try:

“Is beannaichte iadsan a tha bochd nan spiorad:

oir is leo rìoghachd nèimh.”

“Blessed are the poor in spirit,

for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.”