Plenary, 25 Jan 2006

Meeting date: Wednesday, January 25, 2006

Official Report 377KB pdf

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Time for Reflection

Good afternoon. The first item of business today, as it is every Wednesday, is time for reflection. Our time for reflection leader today is Mrs Alison Twaddle, general secretary of the Church of Scotland Guild.

Today is my birthday. It is one that I share, of course, with our national poet, Robert Burns. It is also the date on which the Christian church remembers the conversion of St Paul. They are two very different men, but both have a great deal to say about women, some of which has got them a pretty bad press—particularly in these enlightened, post-feminist times.

However, I do not come to criticise either of those men today, for I think that they are two examples of the glory that is our humanity—with all its flaws and failings. In Burns we have the artistic genius who struggled with his passions in circumstances that demanded more practical application to the economics of survival than he was able to give. When he let his passions rule, he wrote sublime verse but broke hearts and neglected his responsibilities.

Struggles of another kind faced Paul, the new convert to Christianity. He was on fire with zeal for the gospel, but Jesus was not around for him as he had been for Peter and John. Paul was left to work out, somehow, a modus operandi for the infant church. How were the truths of Jesus to be interpreted and applied in the mundane business of living and working in the complex society of first century Palestine? How was the church to be governed? What should its attitude be to the Roman authorities? What was to be the status of marriage and the relationship between the sexes?

They were two men of their time trying to figure out the right thing to do: one on a personal level, tortured by longings and regrets; and one as a leader weighed down by the expectations of others and the awesome implications of the decisions that had to be made.

Some may call me naive, but I am prepared to believe that most politicians are women and men who are trying to figure out the right thing to do. They have their personal weaknesses and their ethical struggles, whatever their religious belief or value system. I can imagine the hard choices and compromises that have to be made in terms of priorities and conflicting loyalties. I want to give you a word of encouragement today, to tell you that we who put you here should not expect you to be perfect. The electorate have placed you in positions of trust and we expect you to struggle to do the right thing, to try, to keep on trying and—above all—to hope. We have the right and the duty to call you to account, but we have no right to expect miracles or saints.