Meeting of the Parliament
Meeting date: Wednesday, April 21, 2010
Official Report
582KB pdf
Time for Reflection
Father Chris Boles SJ (Lauriston Jesuit Centre, Edinburgh)
I suppose that most of you here walk down the Canongate to get to the Parliament, so you regularly pass by the fascinating wall of this building that contains quotations from various people and sources, such as this one from the poem “Inversnaid” by Gerard Manley Hopkins:
“What would the world be, once bereft
Of wet and wildness? Let them be left,
O let them be left, wildness and wet;
Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.”
What you might not know is that Hopkins was, like me, a Jesuit priest and that he wrote “Inversnaid” on a visit to Loch Lomond in 1881 while working in a parish in Glasgow.
At the same time as Hopkins was writing, another of the authors on the Canongate wall was living and loving the wet and wildness, not on Loch Lomond but in California. It is John Muir, and his quote on the wall is short and sweet:
“The battle for conservation will go on endlessly. It is part of the universal battle between right and wrong.”
How right he was.
Hopkins and Muir were men ahead of their time. Both saw how impoverished our lives would be without wild places and the chance to be in nature. They were also men of deep faith, and Muir in particular has important lessons to teach us about finding the sacred in nature and our own place in the natural order. Nodding to another famous author on the Canongate wall, Muir elsewhere reminds us:
“From the dust of the earth, from the common elementary fund, the Creator has made Homo sapiens. From the same material God has made every other creature, however noxious and insignificant to us. They are earth-born companions, and our fellow mortals.”
Because we share a common creaturehood with all other species, we do well to tread carefully on habitats not our own. Besides, we benefit greatly when we enter the world of nature, as Muir, again, reminds us:
“Everybody needs beauty as well as bread, places to play in and pray in, where Nature may heal and cheer and give strength to body and soul alike.”
If it is true that we all need beauty as well as bread, then you in particular, through the work of this Parliament, have the responsibility to ensure that both are provided in good measure. This you already do and, on behalf of all fellow mortals, I encourage you in your efforts.
Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.
The first item of business this afternoon is time for reflection. Our time for reflection leader today is Father Chris Boles, director of the Lauriston Jesuit Centre here in Edinburgh.