Plenary, 16 Mar 2005

Meeting date: Wednesday, March 16, 2005

Official Report 456KB 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 Rev Graham K Blount, the scottish churches parliamentary officer.

Good afternoon. For some reason, my counterpart in the Welsh churches Assembly office felt an urgent need to come up to Scotland to consult me last weekend. We discussed weighty matters of shared concern and then we went hymn-singing together—to Murrayfield. There is a gesture of faith for you.

Even if the embarrassment of the first half was partly redeemed by the second half, I confess that it still drove me to reread MacDiarmid's "A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle". Perhaps MacDiarmid and the kirk are not natural companions, but there is a wonderful stanza in that epic poem in which he writes:

"He canna Scotland see wha yet
Canna see the Infinite,
And Scotland in true scale to it."

There is a richness in that, whether it is about the daunting challenge of testing ourselves against the best—as on Sunday afternoon at Murrayfield—or about getting our worries, our ambitions and even our vision in scale.

That sense of scale grabs me most among the mountains of Assynt. I have just read a book called "Of Big Hills and Wee Men". It was, of course, the title that got me—at my height, it resonates, as do the words of the Psalmist who says:

"When I look at the sky, which you made, at the moon and stars, which you set in their places"—

he could have added Suilven and Stac Pollaidh too—

"what is man, that you think of him; mere man, that you care for him?"

Seeing ourselves in scale does not diminish us as men or women, as politicians or ministers—of either kind—or as a nation. It may stop us from getting carried away with ourselves, but most of all it gives us roots, enriches us and enlarges our vision.

Even the English have a version of MacDiarmid's vision:

"He knows not England, who only England knows".

The vision that looks beyond the horizon of me and mine, of us and wha's like us, and even of the next election, will fuel our future: without it, the people will indeed perish, as the writer of Proverbs says. For churches, which too often fit Edwin Muir's scathing rebuke that

"The Word made flesh here is made word again …
And God three angry letters in a book",

and maybe for Parliaments too, which sometimes struggle to make brave words flesh, there is challenge in trying to live that vision.

Grant us vision, Lord, and courage, for the living of these days. Amen.