Meeting of the Parliament

Meeting date: Tuesday, June 14, 2016

Official Report 847KB pdf

Time for Reflection

The first item of business this afternoon is time for reflection. Our time for reflection leader today is Bishop John Keenan from Paisley.

Every day the church celebrates holy mass, and the gospel reading for today’s mass, which Pope Francis and parishes all over the world have read, is this:

“Jesus said, ‘You have learnt: You must love your neighbour and hate your enemy. But I say love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you; in this way you will be sons of your Father in heaven, for he causes his sun to rise on bad men as well as good, and his rain to fall on honest and dishonest men alike. For if you save your greetings for your brothers, are you doing anything exceptional? You must therefore be perfect just as your heavenly Father is perfect.”

Here, Jesus gives us a new idea about being perfect, or about how to become the politician of the year in his book, if you like. Even if our politics must be founded on loyalty to our party, our integrity should go further and be rooted in loving service to the whole Parliament above and beyond partisan lines.

The kind of loving service that the gospel speaks about is not easy, but its values are already written into the very furniture of the chamber. We could have followed Westminster and its adversarial layout with benches confronting each other. Instead, we opted for an opened-out circle, pointing into a centre of consensus and reaching out, beyond itself, to include everyone.

That, friends, should also be the landscape of the politician’s soul. The good member of the Scottish Parliament knows that he has opponents, but he hopes to be no one’s enemy. Even if she has to face what, from time to time, has hallmarks of hatred from sections of society, she does not wallow in persecution complexes. For as long as he is in power, he does not govern in a way that prefers only his own supporters but does so with a heart that serves the whole people, so that we all suffer rainy days together and enjoy the sunshine equally and to the full.

We pray, dear friends, for business today.

God our Heavenly Father, we thank you for our elected representatives here in this place and we pray that, as each day begins, they come ready to greet all their peers so that our democracy can grow ever richer in the service of our great nation.