Meeting of the Parliament

Meeting date: Wednesday, February 22, 2012

Official Report 676KB pdf

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Time for Reflection

Good afternoon. I am glad to see that you are all nice and relaxed, and refreshed. The first item of business this afternoon is time for reflection. Our time for reflection leader is the Right Rev David Arnott, who is the Moderator of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland.

One of the privileges of being moderator is that I get to travel quite a bit. In my year in office, not only have I travelled around large swathes of Scotland and the United Kingdom, but I have visited places such as Ukraine, Gaza and, recently, Afghanistan. If those are not holiday destinations that trip off the tongue, they are nonetheless areas of our world that have much to teach us.

We heard how, for example, in Beregszász, in Ukraine, the local church centre of the Hungarian Reformed Church produced 47,000 meals for the poor last year. We listened to the director of the hospital in Gaza tell of her difficulties because of the irregular supply of drugs for cancer patients, and about the regular power outages that force people to light their homes with candles and to cook on kerosene stoves; when we were taken to the burns unit and saw the young children there, we saw the unfortunate impact of that.

Recently, I saw at first hand the courage of our young men and women in Camp Bastion who are fighting to make Afghanistan a safer and better place to live. What links all those people in each of those places is a spirit of humility about what they are doing.

I have long regarded it as being one of the roles of the Church of Scotland to set the tone for the community. In the spirit of service and duty, which are integral to our Christian faith, in the welcoming of the stranger with generous hospitality, and in the desire for social justice coupled with love and forgiveness, the church is a key player in setting the tone for our communities. It is a duty that we exercise with humility. Please do not jump to conclusions—I am not suggesting that we become like Uriah Heep. The biblical definition of humility is the act of reaching down to bring other people up. That is what Jesus did—he reached down to bring other people up. To act with humility is to want to get the very best for other people. That is what the church exists for.

I do not think that it is a quantum leap to suggest therefore to our Scottish Parliament that humility ought to be one of the hallmarks here. To reach down to bring people up and to seek to get the very best for every citizen of Scotland, irrespective of class, colour or creed, is a worthy and honourable task.

I stand before you as Moderator of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland, very much aware that the stories of our church and our country are inextricably linked. We cannot understand who we are as a nation without understanding the role that the church has played in it. However, times move on and we now live in a different Scotland; certainly, it is different from the one that I was brought up in as a boy, which is to be welcomed. I acknowledge all the different faiths and denominations and the work that they do, especially when they act with humility in working to ensure that people are the best that they can be, so that our communities benefit. As this nation of ours seeks to find its identity, I venture to suggest that part of that identity is to be found in a humble attitude—in reaching down to bring people up, so that they can be the best that they can be. It is my hope that that, as much as anything else, will help to shape the political thinking here