Meeting of the Parliament

Meeting date: Tuesday, October 25, 2016

Official Report 860KB pdf

Time for Reflection

Good afternoon. Our first item of business is time for reflection, and our leader today is Emeritus Professor Alan Spence, who is professor of creative writing at the University of Aberdeen, an author and a member of the Sri Chinmoy centre in Edinburgh.

Presiding Officer, members of the Scottish Parliament, thank you for the invitation to speak to you on such a glorious autumn day. The theme of my brief talk is living in hope.

Last year, I wrote a play about two great Glaswegians: the poet Edwin Morgan and the trade unionist and parliamentarian Jimmy Reid, who died in the same week back in 2010. My play imagines the pair of them waking up in a kind of afterlife, not quite sure where they are, and they blether and banter, and engage in a fair bit of flyting about life, the universe and post-referendum Scotland: where we have been, where we are, and maybe where we are going.

Towards the end of the play, they are looking at the state of the wider world—the four horsemen of the apocalypse under starter’s orders—but still they hold to something positive as they look back at their lives:

“We did what we could. We did what we did. You live in hope. We lived in hope.”

If this building and your work here are about anything, they are about hope: a sense of possibility and a belief that we can work towards a better world.

Twenty years ago, almost to the day, the wisest man I have ever known visited Scotland. He was my teacher, Sri Chinmoy, who was a poet and philosopher, an artist and musician, an athlete, and, most of all, a man of peace. He was here to give a peace concert and during his visit he composed a song called “My Scotland”, in which he praised the qualities that he saw manifest here: invention, action and discovery. Invention, action, discovery—an entirely positive take on our dynamic possibilities.

Sri Chinmoy passed away in 2007, and the night before he left the earth he spoke very movingly about the power of hope. He looked at life with a clear eye and saw the madness and the folly but also the fact that hope still breathes in us. He wrote:

“Every day must come to you as a new promise, a new aspiration, a new energy … Hope is our inner effort. It inspires us to see something new, to feel something new, to do something new, and finally to become something new. Let us not underestimate the power of hope. No matter how fleeting its life, it offers to us the most convincing and fulfilling power.”

We live in hope.