Time for Reflection
Good afternoon. The first item of business is time for reflection. Our time for reflection leader is the Rev Dr Stewart Gillan, minister of St Michael’s parish church, Linlithgow.
The Rev Dr Stewart Gillan (St Michael’s Parish Church, Linlithgow)
Presiding Officer, First Minister, members of the Scottish Parliament, ladies and gentlemen, it is Burns day, and here in the chamber of the Scottish Parliament—in this place of all places—that can only mean that, today, poetry comes before politics.
My mind goes to the supper—or, for some of you, suppers—in his name. Many of you will have started already: groaning trenchers; sonsie faces; immortal memories that shorten the winter.
As I think of this, I wonder what Burns would have made of the practice—widespread, I should think—of the clergy quoting his poetry; Burns who, vexed to satire, wrote with indignant pen about the holy Willies of the world. Presbyters were not his favourite people.
In his more orthodox moments, as in “A Prayer, in the Prospect of Death”, we get a canny engagement with the Almighty, in which Burns has the presence of mind to confess not only his own part in his waywardness, but God’s part, as he saw it:
“Thou know’st that Thou hast formèd me
With passions wild and strong;
And list’ning to their witching voice
Has often led me wrong.”
As he enters his plea for mercy, he reminds God, in King James language, that God has no choice but to forgive him:
“Where with intention I have err’d,
No other plea I have,
But, thou art good; and Goodness still
Delighteth to forgive.”
It is with regard to the lasses, however, that Burns’s acquaintance with God’s mercy finds its area of specialisation. Here is his assurance of pardon—unauthorised—for a certain church-going Miss Ainslie:
“Fair maid, you need not take the hint,
Nor idle texts pursue;
‘ Twas guilty sinners that he meant,
Not angels such as you.”
Burns is at his Sunday best, though, on Saturday night, with the cotter. He sets his critique of religion with a capital R against the cotter’s simple piety, expressed in “healsome” hospitality and homespun prayer:
“Compar’d with this, how poor Religion’s pride,
In all the pomp of method, and of art;
When men display to congregations wide
Devotion’s ev’ry grace, except the heart!
The Power, incens’d, the pageant will desert,
The pompous strain, the sacerdotal stole:
But haply, in some cottage far apart,
May hear, well-pleas’d, the language of the soul,
And in his Book of Life the inmates poor enrol.”
However, Burns would not thank me for suggesting that he was a reformer of religion. More physical than metaphysical, he preferred his piety to find its footing on the ground in this world. Here he is in a letter to Mrs Frances Anna Dunlop:
“Whatever mitigates the woes or increases the happiness of others, this is my criterion for goodness; and whatever injures society at large, or any individual in it, this is my measure of iniquity.”
Now there’s a creed for a tapsalteerie world.
May God bless you with all grace and wisdom in your service on behalf of the people of Scotland. [Applause.]
I think that we have a speaker for the Parliament’s next Burns supper.