Meeting of the Parliament
Meeting date: Wednesday, December 22, 2010
Official Report
718KB pdf
Time for Reflection
Good afternoon. The first item of business this afternoon is time for reflection. Our time for reflection leader is the Rev Ross Mitchell, who is a retired Church of Scotland minister.
The Rev Ross Mitchell (Church of Scotland)
A few weeks ago, I visited Disneyland Paris in the company of my two granddaughters who are aged seven and four. Devoid of cynical thoughts, they saw its magic and they wondered at it. They knew that it was make-believe, but they accepted it so that they might enjoy the ambience. The smiles on their faces told me that the trip was fulfilling their expectations, even if, at times, I thought that I was experiencing commerce on a grand scale.
However, I give credit where it is due: the Walt Disney Company is masterful at making thoughts turn into realities, even if the realities seem somewhat ethereal and ephemeral. The founding father of the whole enterprise famously said:
“If you can dream it, you can do it.”
The imagination of the child is made visible reality for a few hours. The princesses are no longer characters in a storybook or an animated film; they are there before their very eyes.
Perhaps it is not a huge step from there to claim that this season of the year for Christians such as me is about making thoughts into realities—that is, indeed, the story of the nativity writ large. We believe that the thought at the heart of God for his earthly children to be restored to him took on human form in the person of Jesus of Nazareth. He became the physical reality of the divine plan that we call the salvation story. It is not too crude to say that, for many, it is still sheer magic. However, the magic of this season still has a grounded dimension. Bethlehem, shepherds and travellers from the east are real enough.
Permit me to say that you are not magicians. You are, however, a community of transformation—you make thoughts into realities. For some constituents, you may well be sheer magic; for others, you may not be quite so adored. What is not in dispute is the fact that you take thoughts and you make them become realities. A host of people across our nation have entrusted that noble challenge to you.
Albert Einstein once said:
“I want to know God’s thoughts—the rest are mere details.”
Supremely, God’s thoughts are of love for this world, a love made manifest at Christmas. The rest—the details—can be done in the light of that.
I pray a blessing on each of you and the thoughts that you progress earnestly into realities in this place.