Meeting of the Parliament

Meeting date: Wednesday, May 30, 2012

Official Report 803KB pdf

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Time for Reflection

Good afternoon. The first item of business is time for reflection, which is led today by Father Michael Briody of St Michael’s Church, Moodiesburn.

In Edinburgh in the late 1700s, Lord Monboddo, a Court of Session judge, held dinner parties to which he invited people of contrast, to encourage the exchange of ideas. John Geddes, who was a Catholic bishop, had a standing monthly invite. At a dinner in 1787, the bishop met Robert Burns. Burns was 28 and the bishop was 52. We know that they were both impressed with each other. They probably never met again, but they did correspond.

Two years later, Burns wrote about three matters that they had clearly discussed before. First, he wrote:

“Venerable Father ... I am here, at last, stationary in the serious business of life”,

which was an 18th century reference to finding steady employment rather than trusting to the uncertain income of a poet. Secondly, Burns wrote that he had

“now not only the … leisure, but the … inclination, to attend to those great and important questions, what I am, where I am, and for what I am destined.”

Clearly, the Bishop was not wasting his time at the dinner parties. Thirdly, Burns wrote:

“In ... the conduct of the Man, there was ever but one side on which I was habitually blameable; and there I have secured myself in the way pointed out by Nature and Nature’s God. I was sensible that in so helpless a creature as a poor Poet, a wife and family were incumbrances which a species of prudence would make him shun; but when the alternative was, being at eternal warfare with myself, on account of habitual follies, to give them no worse name, which ... no ... sophisticated infidelity could to me ever justify, I must have been a fool to have hesitated. ... Besides, I had, in ‘My Jean’, a ... much-loved fellow-creature’s happiness or misery among my hands and who could trifle with such a deposite?”

He had married his Jean a year before. I was struck by the timelessness of the subjects, as expressed by our national bard: the need for steady employment, the search for the meaning of life and the stability that is offered by marriage and children.

Your position as MSPs gives you the opportunity to support those ever-present necessities with a particular care for our young people: to strive energetically to find them employment, with the self-esteem that that brings; to encourage them to search for the deeper truth about life which leads to self-respect and respect for others; and to help them to establish stable marriages and to learn the skills of communication and conflict resolution, for the good of parents, children and society. Those three matters contribute enormously to the peaceful society that we all desire. May God inspire your work for our nation.