Meeting of the Parliament (Hybrid)

Meeting date: Tuesday, December 1, 2020

Official Report 1048KB pdf

Time for Reflection

Good afternoon, colleagues. Our first item of business today is time for reflection. Our time for reflection leader is Fr Kenneth Owens, who is the parish priest at St Andrew’s, St Philip’s and St Theresa’s, Livingston and East Calder.

Thank you, Presiding Officer and members of the Scottish Parliament. I welcome the opportunity to share this time for reflection with you.

I come from the Catholic community in Livingston, which is a fruit of the New Towns Act 1946. It saw 10 farms become the second largest settlement in the Lothians. I also come from the village of East Calder, which will shortly, with all the new housing there, become a town. Those two significant facts remind us that change happens. It happens in the lives of individual people and in our communities.

The year 2020 has brought unimaginable changes into our lives. Governments have had to take difficult and unpopular decisions. In order to confront the challenges of Covid-19, we have had to make changes to our routine and lifestyle. Some are very worthwhile and have created more time and space in our lives, and others have restricted our freedoms and movements.

Now is the time when we need to choose courage over comfort. We need to be renewed in hope and we need to take decisions about our personal lives and the way we live in communities. Paul, writing to the Ephesians, reminds us that we should live so that our inner selves may grow strong, and in so doing we will make ourselves more available to our families, to our neighbours and to developing and changing wider society for the better.

We can grow in that aim through a deep and profound exercise of listening to the real needs of individuals and communities. The fruit of that process will be a deeper connection to the things that really matter in our lives. It is an opportunity to stop doing the things that drain our energies and vision. We can choose to do the things that are life affirming and liberating.

Through that process, there will be the possibility of being a better community that is committed to new actions that we can undertake with confidence. It is an invitation to be creative—and even innovative—for the whole community, such that through the pain of the present pandemic, we might become a renewed society that enables us to experience a new community spirit.

In the light of this time for reflection, what one thing is your spirit responding to?