Plenary, 20 Dec 2006

Meeting date: Wednesday, December 20, 2006

Official Report 631KB pdf

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Time for Reflection

Good morning. Our first item of business is time for reflection. Our time for reflection leader is the Most Rev Dr Idris Jones, Primus of the Scottish Episcopal Church.

Good morning. I thought that perhaps I could begin by saying, "I'm the Bishop of Glasgow; this is what I do."

Not everyone in the world can respond to colour, but colour is something that comes into our reckoning at nearly every turn. To begin with, of course, there is election time, when we recognise parties by colour. That goes back a long way, I guess—not least to the Jacobite white rose, for example. If I were founding a party, I wonder what colour I would choose. I suppose it would have to be purple.

Some people make a living out of colour. My wife had the experience of having her colours done, and the result is very good, I have to say. We sometimes say that a person "hasn't got a very good colour", when we mean that they are looking unwell, and where would the interior designer be without the palette of dramatic or pastel or understated colours?

A line of poetry would surely be much duller if the poet was unable to use colour to draw word pictures that were meant to describe not just landscapes but feelings. We talk about people being in a black humour; angry red; livid; in a blue funk; green with envy; yellow with fear—or whatever. Some people say that they have the ability to think in colour. It is certainly true that in counselling rooms care is taken to decorate in such a way as to produce the right ambience to help the client to engage with emotion in a constructive way.

And what about "trooping the colour", as another use?

Sadly, the use of colour is sometimes an occasion for division. Colour can be used to stir up hatred. I do not think that I need to illustrate that, because it is still too much a part of some lives in some of the communities in our nation. Members of this Parliament have an honourable record in trying to stamp out that kind of discrimination. It would be good to look to a time when that association with the use of colour no longer means anything at all.

There are hopeful signs, too. As South Africa emerged from the dark days of apartheid, Desmond Tutu, among others, began to use a different colour image—the rainbow people. There is an aspiration that we can sign up to: to use whatever sense of colour we have to help us to work for a world in which diversity is celebrated but in which we sense that we all belong together. I can sing a rainbow. Will you?