Meeting of the Parliament (Hybrid)

Meeting date: Tuesday, December 14, 2021

Official Report 1009KB pdf

Time for Reflection

Good afternoon. I remind members of the Covid-related measures that are in place and that face coverings should be worn when moving around the chamber and across the Holyrood campus. The first item of business is time for reflection, and our leader today is Canon Gerard Tartaglia of St Margaret’s and Our Holy Redeemer churches, Whitecrook, Clydebank.

Presiding Officer, members of this Scottish Parliament and all who contribute here, by your presence and action, it is a pleasure for me to be able to spend these few moments in reflection with you, before you get down to business.

Reflecting is never a waste of time. So much of our life is lived at top speed, racing around, in demand, and doing what is wanted of us. We badly need to back off a little and confront ourselves, and why we think and live the way that we do.

All of us were younger once—even the youngest contributor to the life of our beloved Parliament was younger once. I want to take a little time to reflect on the young people of Scotland. From my life in the parish in Clydebank and from our youth groups and young adults, I know the tremendous gifts and qualities that young people have and exhibit. There is a huge compassionate heart in so many of our young people and a deep desire to know why they are here and what their lives might mean.

That is no surprise. They reflect how they have been made—with the generous heart of a compassionate God. Our job is to guide and encourage those who are younger to be a good example, to be coherent and, in this Parliament in particular, to offer consistent and stable government, so that they can explore themselves, their communities, their society, their faith and the world.

You may not have considered this before, but Jesus the teacher, rabbi and son of God, was in his 30s when he began his ministry, but his disciples, followers and students—Peter and Andrew, James and John, Mary Magdalene, Martha and Mary, Lazarus, and all the others—were not the same age, or the old men and women of statues and stories. They would have been younger: 17, 21, 25 years of age. They grew to be brave and determined, searching and desiring to discover what their calling and their purpose might be.

Our young people are in the same boat. They need to be encouraged and supported by those who are older, with a real heart and love for them.

Lord God, help us to be people who, through genuine self-reflection and by our good example, inspire our young people to greater things, to know themselves better, and to come to a mature understanding of what they are called to be, and to live it to the full with real joy. Amen.