Good afternoon. The first item of business is time for reflection. Our time for reflection leader today is the Rev Teri C Peterson, the minister at Gourock, St John’s Church of Scotland.
Presiding Officer and members of the Scottish Parliament, thank you for the opportunity to address you today.
I have been thinking a lot lately, as many of us have, about change. On the one hand, change is constant. The pace of technology, for instance, often seems to outstrip our capacity to adapt. On the other hand, many of us hate change and long for simpler bygone days of stability. On a third hand, I suppose, is the feeling that nothing really changes, and that we are stuck with the way things are. Nothing changes for our beleaguered high streets. Nothing changes with embedded racist attitudes. Nothing changes with our sense, correct or not, of corruption in our institutions. Nothing changes—this is true—about the dreich west of Scotland weather. Nothing changes about human nature.
That feeling of stuckness leads us straight to despair. Nothing changes, so we just have to put up with the way things are, or as people say to me all the time, “You’ve just got to get on with it.” Keep doing the same old things the same old way, but be prepared for outrage when symptoms of despair are all around. Loneliness, drug deaths, mental health crises, deeper entrenchment of bigotry and even litter are symptoms, because why take pride in caring for our place if there is no point?
In the Christian calendar, we are nearly at the season of Advent, which begins on Sunday. Advent is a season of expectation and a season of hope. That is what our world-view needs these days more than ever: hope. It does not need wishful thinking, empty promises made just to get or keep power, negativity or blame about how those people across the aisle or across the street or across the border or across the world are keeping us from utopia, but real hope that is grounded in facts and in imagination about what is possible. It needs hope that is grounded in the belief that things can change for the better. We are not stuck in the way things have aye been. It needs hope that transcends the obstacles that we always think are in our way, such as party lines, accents, school backgrounds or whatever the barrier du jour is. It needs hope that leads us forward, not backward to some imagined perfect past.
This season, leaders of all types need to cast a vision of hope that inspires us to come together and inspires us to put our hearts, minds and hands to the task of creating the better future that we all say we want but in the next breath will lament is impossible. It is only impossible if we give up on it, so please, in this season and beyond, let us lead with hope.
Thank you.