Meeting of the Parliament

Meeting date: Wednesday, December 15, 2010

Official Report 816KB pdf

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Time for Reflection

Good afternoon. The first item of business is time for reflection. Our time for reflection leader today is Canon Ian Paton of Old St Paul’s episcopal church here in Edinburgh.

Today is my son Christopher’s 13th birthday so, as a father, I am about to enter the teenage years. Why am I telling you this? First, it is so that I will gain your immediate sympathetic attention but, secondly, it is to invite you to think with me about being a teenager.

Being teenage is like a today that is all about tomorrow, even when you do not want it to be. Teenage life is full of expectations, hopes, questions and anxieties—thrown at you by parents and teachers, your peers and your friends—about exams, careers, relationships and who you are.

Perhaps politics can also seem like a today that is all about tomorrow. Our expectations and hopes are laid on your shoulders, and our questions and anxieties are, too. We know the problems that you are tackling on our behalf today, but who knows what problems will come tomorrow? For you, as for our teenagers, vision and reality, hopes and anxieties, all come together as you contemplate our future.

In the Christian calendar, Advent, the four weeks leading up to Christmas, is the season for contemplating the future; not just Christmas, but the Future—with a capital F. We look for hope in that future, and we try to be more accountable to it. You don’t have to believe in the second coming to know that judgment of the present lies in the future and that it is tomorrow that will judge today, so in Advent we celebrate the gifts that help us to act today out of a belief in tomorrow—desire for justice, hope for humanity, joy in life—and we seek to share those gifts with others.

In thanking you for the privilege of being with you, I wish you a very happy Christmas and a good new year, I wish my son a happy birthday and I ask, if you will allow me, with this traditional Christian prayer for Advent, to pray for us all to be blessed today as we contemplate our tomorrow.

Almighty God,

give us grace to cast away the works of darkness

and to put upon us the armour of light,

now in the time of this mortal life

in which thy Son, Jesus Christ,

came to us in great humility;

that, in the last day, when he shall come again

in his glorious majesty to judge both the living and the dead,

we may rise to the life immortal:

through him who liveth and reigneth with thee

and the Holy Spirit, one God, world without end.

Amen.

Thank you.