Fife's Finest Songs of Praise

This week, I'm in the home of golf.

The ancient university town of St Andrews.

This week, the professor who's jazzing up his church,

Prince William's university tutor,

life-saving medical research,

and we have hymns from Dunfermline Abbey and St Andrews university.

We're in Fife, ancient kingdom capital of Scotland,

sandwiched between the Forth and the Tay,

it has an almost island-like character.

This is North Queensferry, and over there is South Queensferry,

both of them called after Queen Margaret of Scotland

who established the first crossing here at the narrowest point

of the Forth estuary, almost a thousand years ago.

It was done so that people could move more easily

to and from the seat of power of the kings of Scotland, Dunfermline.

And it's from there that our first hymn comes today.

Travelling through its winding country roads

and fertile fields, you can see why Fife was the home of kings.

Falkland Palace, the country residence of the Stuarts,

still draws many visitors.

From the ancient royal capital in Dunfermline,

we're moving northeast, to another popular holiday resort,

the ancient religious capital, St Andrews.

It's probably best known as the home of golf.

It's here that the game was invented.

And today, St Andrews residents can play golf

on all the world famous links courses for a whole year,

for less than some people pay for a single round on other courses.

So, I just had to have a go.

Now, let me tell you, I have never in my entire life hit a golf ball.

Legs bent.

Arms straight.

Oh!

SHE LAUGHS

Awfully sorry! Frankly, I thought that was rather good.

It's just a little unfortunate I also nearly hit a runner.

Perhaps I should just stick to a gentle walk,

just across the dunes where Chariots Of Fire was filmed,

or amongst the ruins of Scotland's largest cathedral,

still evoking memories of when pilgrims flocked here

to visit the relics of the apostle, Andrew.

This place was the focal point

not just for the ancient streets of St Andrews,

but for the religious life of Scotland.

And then, of course, there's the university.

At 600 years old, St Andrews is the third oldest

university in Britain after Oxford and Cambridge.

St Salvator's Chapel is almost as old. 550 years to be exact.

And it's from here that our next hymn is coming.

A hymn which remembers the apostle

after whom both the university and the town were named.

In February this year, Prince William and Catherine Middleton

returned to the university where they met as students.

This is a very special moment for Catherine and me.

It feels like coming home.

They were launching the university's 600th anniversary celebrations.

During his time here, Prince William studied geography

and Charles Warren was his tutor.

He's the future king, in another sense he was just another student.

And he was very keen to be treated as such.

So, we didn't make any adjustments to our teaching,

you know, he was in the class, he was in the lecture theatre.

He's the easiest guy to chat to. Incredibly down to earth.

Surprisingly down to earth given his background.

Charles told me how he came to be at St Andrews in the first place.

It goes back to a number of particular junctions,

forks in the road at points in my life.

Where it has seemed very clear

that God's had a hand in pushing me down one fork and not the other.

And there was one particularly, the job before this one.

I'd applied for the job

and I was committed to an expedition to Patagonia.

As the expedition departure date approached,

I had this increasingly nagging sense that maybe I shouldn't be going.

So, I prayed, and I got my family praying

and it was one of those occasions where we had a unanimous sense

of God saying the same thing.

You still didn't know why?

No, no clue. No clue at all.

But simply that it was OK, as it were, for me to go

but I should come back a week early.

And then it turned out, extraordinarily, that

the day I got back to Heathrow

was the day of the interview for this job.

People are often suspicious of that kind of interpretation of events.

What makes you so sure that it was God speaking to you?

I think because it came out very directly out of a process of prayer.

You know, we were asking God, "What is the right way forward, here?"

And we had that same unanimous sense of what he was saying.

Right down to how much earlier I should come back.

So, it just seemed like God.

I mean, that may all be completely false,

but it certainly seems to stack up to me.

Medicine, I think, has been taught

and practised in St Andrews

for well over a thousand years.

The first teachers of medicine were probably monks,

who looked after the hospices and hospitals

around the great cathedral.

Hugh MacDougall has brought 21st century medicine

much closer to scientific research.

We believe that the future of medical progress

must involve interactions between doctors and scientists.

Individual disciplines often reach the limits of their intuitive thinking

and with the cross-fertilisation

of mathematicians and physicists and chemists,

we can be stimulated to take the subject forward

in a way that may not be possible elsewhere.

This kind of approach is saving lives all over the world,

by reducing the time it takes to treat the killer disease, tuberculosis.

And it does this by drawing on the skills

of the department of astrophysics.

They're used to modelling the sun and...

I don't understand much about it.

Plasma fluxes within the sun, and that's very complicated.

And they use very complicated mathematical models to do that.

TB treatment is complicated too,

so we're using their skills and working with them,

to try and understand what we would need to do

to shorten the treatment from its current length

to what we want it to be. How would that look?

We'll get data from that which will inform other colleagues

who are working on new drugs.

What's behind your own motivation?

To what extent is that your Christian faith?

Well, it's certainly one of the reasons

why I've chosen to work on tuberculosis,

because TB is a disease of the poor,

and its a disease that makes people poor.

And so I think that's a very good thing to be working on.

But I'm fortunate to work with a wide range of colleagues

all over the world, of different faiths and of no faiths,

and it's good to do that, because if we're going to defeat TB,

the whole world population's got to work on it.

It's a really difficult problem. So, it's a very exciting thing to be working in.

# Locus iste

# A deo factus est

# Locus iste

# A deo factus est

# A deo

# A deo factus est

# Inaestimabile

# Sacramentum

# Inaestimabile

# Inaestimabile

# Sacramentum

# Irreprehensibilis est

# Irreprehensibilis est

# Irreprehensibilis est

# Irreprehensibilis est

# Locus iste

# A deo factus est

# Locus iste

# A deo factus est

# A deo

# Deo

# Deo

# A deo

# Deo

# Factus

# Est. #

'One, two, three, four.'

Richard Michael is professor of jazz improvisation

at St Andrews university.

You did exactly the right thing. You started to move.

-ORGAN MUSIC

-He also plays in his local church.

Where his music choices can sometimes raise a smile.

I'm here in church as an organist, to enhance what our minister does.

And sometimes

I feel inspired by a sermon,

and I've no idea what I'm going to play, but I like it like that.

There are some key words that keep coming up in the Bible.

One of which is love.

Now, great love songs. But you've got to play them in the style.

You can't go playing a love song, I can't play it in the style of Bach.

I could do... HE PLAYS IN THE STYLE OF BACH

It actually sounds much better if I go...

HE PLAYS JAZZ

And people recognise that, and here's a great love song.

I mean, we talk about, in the church, cadences.

A perfect cadence is one that goes... HE PLAYS TWO CHORDS

But the plagal cadence is the Amen.

HE PLAYS TWO CHORDS

OK. That's boring! All right, not, but it's not boring

when you hear it in this tune.

HE PLAYS "Let There Be Love"

Let There Be Love. And when it finishes,

# But first of all, please

# Let there be love. # And you go, "Oh, yeah."

Aha! Whoa!

Ah!

Man, it's rocking, you know?

And I suddenly realise... should I be doing this?

But I get the feeling as I look around the church, that people go...

Yeah, I should.

And I do!

'Through music, I find things that inspire me

'and lead me to developing my faith.'

And if I can do something to give somebody a smile on a Sunday morning,

or get a kid who's come into Fife Youth Jazz Orchestra,

play a solo, however many notes that could be improved,

it doesnae matter. The fact is,

I've got somebody to do something that they couldn't do before.

That improves them as a person. It grows.

Faith gives me the answer that, that's what I'm here for,

whether I like it or not!

The kingdom of Fife is a favourite holiday spot.

As well as its lovely old harbours and sandy beaches,

there are dozens of golf courses,

there are views of the sea, the challenge of the wind

and a very different kind of grass from England's courses.

Travelling south from St Andrews to Largo, you pass Kingsbarns,

where the 11th hole offers something of a challenge.

Further south at Lundin Links, the club steward,

Janice Cunningham, is a familiar face to the club's many members.

She manages the club house along with her husband.

But behind her cheerful exterior lies a series of testing challenges,

including the tragic loss, 16 years ago of her firstborn son, Noel.

Well, he was standing near the Royal and Ancient at St Andrews,

and a freak wave came over and washed him under a hole in the fence

and he was lost. He was missing for ten days.

And in that time, people rallied round us,

and I think God just sent us people.

Sent us good people with practical solutions

to the problems that we had.

And then a few years later, you lost another son.

Yes, our third child, Lewis. He was 18 and died in a house fire.

Absolutely shattering.

You can't pretend that it wasn't, but it was very...

it was just an awful, awful time.

But there again, that whole community rallied round us,

and gave us strength and helped the family.

Everyone just rallied round.

And again, the practical things that were needing done.

Did you never say to yourself, "Where was God when that wave came?

"Where was God when the house went on fire?"

I think that's difficult to say,

that I didn't ask where God was,

I asked God for the strength to cope with what I'd been given.

Because I imagine that even now...

-I mean, grief like that never heals, does it?

-No.

I think people... it's easy to say time's a great healer.

I think time makes you realise that things go on. You have to move on.

But you never forget. It's never out of your head.

And you learn to live with it. You learn to live your life with it

and it runs alongside your life always.

And I wouldn't want it any other way.

I wouldn't like anyone to say that they were gone and forgotten.

Although they're not with us now.

They are with us, most definitely with us.

And God's still there?

Oh, absolutely. Absolutely.

I don't like to sound too much like a Holy Willie,

but He is definitely, I think, always in your life. And...

..everything, I think, happens for a reason.

I'd like to know what the reasons really are,

but I'm sure I'm going to find out sometime.

# Pie Jesu

# Pie Jesu

# Pie Jesu

# Pie Jesu

# Qui tollis peccata mundi

# Dona eis requiem

# Dona eis requiem

# Pie Jesu

# Pie Jesu

# Pie Jesu

# Pie Jesu

# Qui tollis peccata mundi

# Dona eis requiem

# Dona eis requiem

# Agnus Dei

# Agnus Dei

# Agnus Dei

# Agnus Dei

# Qui tollis peccata mundi

# Dona eis requiem

# Dona eis requiem

# Sempiternam

# Sempiternam

# Requiem

# Sempiternam. #

We thank you for your hidden hand,

guiding us through the surprises of our lives' journeys.

We thank you for the instinct you have given us

to find new ways to care for each other.

We thank you for carrying us through the dark nights to the dawn

and the sunrise which brings new light and hope.

Next week, our last from the kingdom of Fife,

a scientist who knows how the sun works,

a story of hope after a freak lifeboat accident,

and more great hymns from Dunfermline and St Andrews.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd

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