The Scottish Parliament Chamber Business - September 2019, 17 Sep 2019

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From YouTube: Time For Reflection - 17 September 2019

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Published by the Scottish Parliament Corporate Body.

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A

Good afternoon, our first item of business is time for reflection and our time for reflection. Leader today is the Reverend cannon David Richards who's director at some pauses in George's Episcopal Church in Edinburgh.

B

Presiding officer, members of the Scottish Parliament um I want to begin with some words of the former Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks. He said this.

B

There are moments in history and we're living through one now when something new is taking shape, but we don't know precisely what the results like all around us: the fraying of the social bond, the partisanship of politics, at a time when national interest demands something larger, the loss of trust in public institutions, the build-up of debt, whose burden will fall on future generations and the failure of a shared morality to lift us out of the morass of individualism, Hedden, ISM, consumerism and relativism.

B

We know these things, yet we seem collectively powerless to move beyond them. Jonathan Sacks spoke those words in 2014 before the Scottish and brexit referendums. Before the electoral success of Donald, Trump and others, the mind can only boggle what he would right now for 250 years, the Enlightenment shaped and formed us in the words of Immanuel Kant, as humankind emerged from self-incurred immaturity and it began to shape how we thought and lived and Scotland was at the forefront. Much good has been accomplished.

B

Medical science has made breakthroughs, we thought impossible, and yet, although we can travel further faster higher than previous generations, the question remains whether we are any happier. The first minister raised this in her TED talk in July. That happiness is perhaps a worthier measure of a society's health than simply economic prosperity.

B

The reality is that we live in a society and culture where we are perhaps the most anxious, uncertain and stressed that we have ever been. Some may yearn for a time in the past when Britannia ruled waves, some may not.

B

But what if this, that we see around us is in fact the new normal globally, 700 million people still live in extreme poverty, a million children die of pneumonia every year, half a million children still die of diarrhea or malaria, and 300 million people are diagnosed as clinically depressed with 800 thousand people here still taking their own lives.

B

The reality is that we are living through five global crises: social, economic, religious, political and environmental.

B

2,000 years ago, the Apostle Paul wrote to a young leader struggling to develop an embryonic Church in a city full of Commerce political intrigue, sexual politics and dissent, and he wrote these words to Timothy, but you keep your head in all situations and your hardship do the work of an evangelist discharge, all the duties of your ministry.

B

If some Paul had come from Glasgow, he might have said, keep the heat as our leaders. We need you to keep the heed to discharge all the duties of your ministries, but through it all to keep your head, especially if you're playing swing ball. That Keep Calm work for the common good. Even though we and you may disagree how we might get there.

B