Meeting of the Parliament

Meeting date: Tuesday, December 4, 2018

Official Report 1234KB pdf

Time for Reflection

Good afternoon. Our first item of business is time for reflection, for which our leader is the Rev Richard Rowe, chaplain to HMS Prince of Wales.

Presiding Officer, members of the Scottish Parliament, thank you for the privilege and opportunity of sharing with you this afternoon.

We are in the Christian season of Advent. Culturally, it would appear that we move straight from Hallowe’en to Christmas, with a brief pause for remembrance Sunday, but in doing so we miss something profound and distinctly human: having to wait, being prepared to put one’s own needs and desires second to another’s. Advent is saying that there is a better thing, a better one coming, and that you had better get ready. Make it easy for this wonderful event to happen—prepare the way, which means that it is going to take time.

There are resonances of this in our everyday lives. I am a royal naval chaplain, which means that I engage with royal naval service personnel of whatever rate or rank. They are precious to me and they all have equal right of access to whatever I can offer, whatever their faith system or none. I go where they go and participate where I can. That sometimes means waiting: waiting with the rest of a ship’s company for the next evolution in an exercise, waiting for the return of a ship or a submarine—waiting.

Of course, in the normal circumstances of life, we wait for our significant others while they shop on a Saturday. We wait for friends to arrive for a long-anticipated meal. We wait for our favourite team to score or to be promoted—perhaps a longer wait for some than for others. We wait for the start of a business session here, or in the other place, or in any firm that you care to mention.

Waiting is something that we do not have a lot of control over. How we wait—the attitude that we hold as we wait—is something that we do have control over. There are many things in life that we can neither control nor change, and waiting is just one of them. What makes the difference is how we react to those things: how we behave when we cannot have, or do, what we want when we want it.

It is often in the waiting—in the margins, before the Presiding Officer arrives, the exercise starts, the meal is served, or the game kicks off—that we engage with the people who are around us. That is where they get to know us and we get to know them, where it is less about them uns and us uns than it is about the shared experiences and the banter that arises, where barriers are breached, where we build relationships, and where we prepare the way.

At Advent, we prepare our hearts to receive afresh God made flesh in Jesus, the one who dwelled among us, as John’s gospel says, full of grace and truth. As we wait with friends and acquaintances, our team and their team, may we use words of grace, truth, respect and loving kindness—that his way may be prepared, and that we may be fully human under God.

God bless you all.