Good afternoon. I remind members of the Covid-related measures that are in place. Face coverings should be worn as you move around the chamber and across the Holyrood campus.
The first item of business this afternoon is time for reflection. Our time for reflection leader today is Father Jim Duggan, parish priest, St Charles Roman Catholic church, Paisley.
Thank you, Presiding Officer, for inviting me to lead time for reflection.
Recently, I was making a choice between two good but different possibilities for my work. In discerning what might be the right choice to make, I spoke with a few people: my best friend; a colleague who runs NET Ministries Scotland, a youth ministry that we founded; and my spiritual director, a Franciscan friar of the renewal, who, daily, at the friars’ soup kitchen, helps people whose life circumstances are extremely challenging.
It struck me how good it is to be part of a community of people who have different perspectives and who support and inspire me, and how amazing it is, after almost 30 years as a priest, still to have various interesting and exciting opportunities ahead.
This makes me grateful for the choices that others have made and which benefited me and let me have dreams and aspirations.
As an adopted child, I am grateful for my birth mother, who made an extremely difficult choice for the good of her son. I am grateful for my mum and dad, who gave me a loving home, nurtured me and supported me always. I am grateful for the educators who saw where my talents lay and guided me.
I am grateful for the church that helped me to see, in the words of St John Henry, Cardinal Newman, that
“God has created me to do Him some definite service. He has committed some work to me which He has not committed to another. I have my mission.”
And I am grateful for the choices that, I believe, created a person-centred, high-quality education system and supported the opportunities that arise from such a system, enabling people from a modest background like mine to grow up with dreams—and with the hope that those dreams can become the reality.
I am really saddened when I see young people who are without hope, who have no notion of their own goodness and what they have to offer, and who do not live in an environment in which they can aspire to the kinds of thing to which I could aspire when I was growing up.
However, I am heartened that having the Scottish Parliament means that our country has a committed community of people, with different perspectives, who are working to support, inspire and encourage those young people, and all people in our country, to have dreams and to strive to fulfil them. [Applause.]