Official Report 759KB pdf
Good afternoon. Our first item of business is time for reflection, and our time for reflection leader today is Ronit Quayle, a celebrant from the Humanist Society Scotland.
Presiding Officer, thank you for inviting me to address the Parliament.
As a celebrant with the charity Humanist Society Scotland, my job is to tell stories—everyday stories of everyday folk. I celebrate the banalities and mundanities of people and their lives. It is those seemingly unimportant things that make up a life, and they are always worth celebrating.
When I tell love stories at weddings, my couples rarely tell me about the big romantic gestures. It is the wee things. It is hanging up the laundry because they left it in the machine—again. It is the jammies left on the radiator for somebody coming home from a night shift. It is going to the supermarket a bit further away because it sells their favourite biscuits.
“Love” is a verb, because it is a doing word. Can you tell that I have a primary school-aged child? I am privileged to see and to celebrate the myriad ways in which love is shown.
I told a man’s story at his funeral recently. I said something that might sound like nothing at all but that is, I think, everything. I said, “He was a good man,” and he was. His name will not be recorded in the history books. He did not change the world, but he changed the world of those who loved him. That is something that all of us have the power to do—the power and, perhaps, the responsibility.
The world is a scary place, and it feels like it is getting scarier. It is easy to feel helpless and powerless—to think, “How can I possibly make the world a better place?” The problems that we face feel too big, too complicated and too deeply entrenched, so is there even any point in trying?
It is easy to think that our actions are superfluous, but they are not. Your job is to do what you can to make Scotland a better place. You hear the stories of your constituents and are tasked with making them happier stories. Will each of you change the world? I believe so.
The work of being a good person is not grand and will rarely make headlines, but we all have the power to make the lives of the people we encounter just a wee bit better, so that, at the end of our lives, people who tell our story will say, “She was a good woman,” and those words will be true.