Meeting of the Parliament

Meeting date: Wednesday, March 21, 2012

Official Report 805KB pdf

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Time for Reflection

Good afternoon. The first item of business is time for reflection. Our time for reflection leader is the Rev Caroline Taylor, minister of Leuchars: St Athernase Church of Scotland.

Last Sunday was mothering Sunday, now more commonly known as mother’s day. It was once the day when people in outlying hamlets made the pilgrimage to their “mother church”. In due course, this holy day became a holiday when, for instance, servants were given time off to visit their families. We might well imagine lads and lasses picking some wild flowers for their mothers as they walked home. The fortunate ones would have been given some food from their place of employment, traditionally a simnel cake, whose decoration featured 13 eggs to symbolise Jesus and his disciples.

Like other traditions with Christian roots, mother’s day has become commercialised. The benefit of billboard advertising of “special” lunches and the displays of hearts and flowers in shops is that they bring the occasion to our attention. In our busy lives, we might need that reminder to give some thought to treating our mum—or, indeed, our gran, our mother-in-law or the mother of our children.

During December 2010, I was amazed at the discomfort and the risks people were prepared to take in order to get home for Christmas. Mother’s day is always the fourth Sunday in Lent and therefore snow is less likely, but people will still make changes to their usual timetable to bring the family together.

On mother’s day, an old lady in a nursing home might receive a visit or someone who is housebound might be taken out for a drive but essentially this occasion is less about mums and more about the extended family. It is a day when individuals who are scattered around the country might try to meet or when children and adults can sit down to eat together and simply enjoy being a family. Such things find a parallel in the mothering Sunday traditions of old, when it was customary to relax the strict fasting required during the 40 days of Lent.

Lent was—and is—a time when Christians try to draw closer to God. Some do this by denying themselves something, just as Jesus fasted for 40 days in the wilderness. Increasingly, however, organisations such as Christian Aid and the Scottish Catholic International Aid Fund are offering Lent disciplines that focus our minds on helping the poorest people in our world and thus mirror Jesus’ own ministry among those who were on the margins of society.

Jesus said:

“anything you did for one of my brothers or sisters here, however insignificant, you did for me.”