Good afternoon and welcome back. The first item of business this afternoon is time for reflection. Our time for reflection leader today is the Rev Stephen Taylor, the minister of the Kirk of St Nicholas Uniting in Aberdeen.
Presiding Officer, members of the Scottish Parliament, in January this year, in front of 1 million people in Manila, a little 12-year-old girl, Glyzelle Palomar, asked Pope Francis an unscripted question. “Why does God let children suffer? Terrible things happen to children. It’s not their fault. Why does God permit it?”, she asked through tears.
Francis did not correct Glyzelle’s theology or attempt to pacify her. She had just told him that she scrounged food from a rubbish tip and slept outside on a mat made of cardboard. He embraced the crying child in his arms. He then took the crowd to task and told them to pay close attention because, he said, “She has just asked the one question with no answer.” To Glyzelle he said, “Only when we can weep for the things you have lived will we understand anything and be able to answer you.”
Then he taught the assembled, “The world needs to weep. The marginalized weep, the scorned weep, but we who are more or less without needs, we don’t know how to weep. We must learn. There are realities in this life you can see only with eyes cleaned and clarified by tears.”
When we see the suffering of children, the plight of the refugee, the economic injustice of our communities, and the anguish around us, and whenever we are asked the question with no answer, “Our answer must be a word born of tears.” That word is compassion and the essence of compassion is not just an attitude but action.
The longer I live, the more I am convinced that there are only two things that matter in this world: unrelieved suffering and unrelenting compassion—only these two are real. A compassionate life is one that suspends itself like a fragile bridge between those two things, willingly between the pain and the wonder, the shadow and the light.
It is not only the tears that we weep that determine real compassion but the values that we uphold in our everyday lives—by the honesty of our relationships, by the justice that we promote in our communities, by the respect that we express for others, by the hospitality of our welcome to the stranger and by using our financial blessings and our material resources to help those in need. Compassion is really about good values that should be lived out in every place, especially this place.
When we live out our compassion in the love we share, in the service we give, in the welcome we express and in the justice we promote, we personify compassion. Let us be the compassion the world needs. May you be the compassion that this nation needs.
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