Dear brothers and sisters,
We gather this evening on the Feast of Saint Columba who was perhaps Scotland’s most effective evangeliser and who is surely with us now from heaven as our friend, teacher and intercessor as we take up the challenge of a new evangelisation of our land today.  Columba’s coming to Scotland marked a personal conversion in the journey of his Catholic faith and it was so powerful that it became one of the forces that created the nation of Scotland itself, unified and founded on his faith in Our Lord Jesus Christ.  Under his influence Scotland would, in time, send missionaries across Europe to help Western civilisation to be born afresh out of the passing of the Roman Empire as the Christian continent it has now been for well over a millennium.
For Columba coming to Scotland marked a further conversion to Christ from within his already settled Catholic faith.  Growing up in the faith of Ireland and entering the monastery, Columba soon found himself mired in the politics of a cultural Catholicism that persisted at the time.  Life in the Church then was bound up with administration and worldly affairs.  Power and position had become so dominant that they embroiled Columba in a religious feud that cost thousands of lives on the battle field.  Looking down on the carnage Columba knew that this Catholic faith had wandered far from the Gospel preached by Jesus and that the Church desperately needed re-focus on Christ’s initial mandate of evenagelisation.  So, for Columba, coming to Scotland meant leaving behind the dead, cultural Catholicism of his birth and finding authentic discipleship of Christ in living for the Kingdom of God alone.  It meant refocusing his faith on mission, it involved getting beyond Church politics and pressing forward into Christian evangelisation, and it demanded quitting the powerful institution of the monastery in order to set up fledgling schools of evangelisation.  This new conversion within old faith was one of the most decisive events in the history of our county and continent.  It set the Catholic Church in this part of the world on a journey from a religious entrenchment that was costing lives to a Gospel freedom that would bring countless souls for Christ.  It is this mantle we take on today as we set about the renewal of our Catholic faith in this new millennium and the new evangelisation of our people in the generations ahead.
Please God this evening’s blessing and distribution of our Synod Acta can write another happy page in the story of evangelisation of our shores.  I do personally believe our Synod Acta contain words of the Holy Spirit Himself to our diocese in these times, and I believe He has spoken definitively to us through our people, or to give them their full dignity, the People of God.  In this sensus fidelium we have heard authentic voice of God.  In this sense I hope we will accept our Acta as authoritative, not because they are published by canonical decree of the bishop, but because they present Church’s teachings directly and show our people crying out for their fulfilment.  From now on they are our diocesan bible with a small ‘b’ and catechism with a small ‘c’. In short these Acta are God’s own hand guiding our diocese into the future.  Insofar as we commit ourselves to them we will find a path to our own personal holiness as well as a way to the refreshment of our diocesan Church.
In our First Reading Saint Paul addresses the people of Colossae as chosen people.  He saw how the Lord had singled them out for a particular mission in their times.  He commended the whole community because, though under pressure from the fashions of their times, they had not succumbed to its false doctrines.  Now he exhorts them to spread the Gospel and bring their culture to Christ.  By means of our Synod I am sure that the Lord is singling out us for a particular work of new evangelisation that will engage our whole Church –clergy, religious and laity – in a new mission to our culture, and I have every confidence we will find the courage and spirit to say yes to his election.
But Saint Paul insists that being chosen involves renouncing any spirit of superiority and looks for every Christian, whatever rank or office, to work in a harmony of compassion, kindness and humility.  Every suggestion of renewal is to be received with gentleness, all teaching given with the kind wisdom of fraternal advice. Paul knows that tensions will arise in the desire to press forward in discipleship, but quarrels should be extinguished as soon as possible with forgiveness.  The only Charter that really counts is our love for God and each other with peace in our ways and thanksgiving in our hearts. 
In the Gospel Jesus talks of brambles and thorns that can rise up unexpectedly at any time in our midst.  Despite the much good work that has gone on in service of the Kingdom of God, you could say that these recent years in our Church have felt something like a succession of bramble stings and a multitude of sore thorns.  This evening the same Gospel encourages us to hope for something new, for a fresh chapter in the life of the Church and a time to enjoy the sweeter fruits of living out our faith.  After much effort of discernment and deliberation, and after giving ourselves to prayer and catechesis, our Synod Acta - the fruit of God’s grace and the work of our hands - have grown up among us as a surprisingly Good Tree, to offer us rich pickings in due season into the years ahead.  They are a treasure chest, a store for us to return to, time and again, to draw out good things, old and new. 
In the end it is to Our Lady we turn, and to our own Our Lady of Paisley, whose motherly hand and heart have guided us from the beginning until now.  The inscription that belongs to her reads Hac ne vade via nisi dixeris Ave Maria, Sit semper sine via, qui non tibi dicet Ave.  In short, any Christian community that moves forward without Her will find itself wandering aimlessly as a vagrants but the community that sets out with Her at its side, is embarking on a blessed pilgrimage that leads to Her Son and His promise to make all things new.