 The first item of business this morning is time for reflection, and our time for reflection leader today is Reverend Neil Gardner, Minister Cannongate Kirk. This ancient parish in which our respective places of work, yours and mine are set, traces its origins back to the 12th century and the legendary encounter between King David I and an angry stag in the forest that once stood where the wide open plains of Holyrood park now extend just beyond the palace. Just at the point where the stag was ready to attack King David, it is said that he had a vision of the cross of Jesus amongst its sharp antlers and the stag suddenly withdrew to the forest and left the king alone. As a result and as a sign of his thankfulness David vowed that he would build an abbey as close to the spot as possible. So the story of the abbey of the Holyrood in old language Holy Cross began to take shape all those centuries ago. To this day we have the cross and the antlers as the striking emblem of Cannongate Kirk. But I've often wondered why the king's immediate reaction was to build an abbey in the first place, and indeed why he went on to establish the great border abbeys of Drybara, Jedbara, Kelso and Melrose too. And I can't help feeling the answer must lie somewhere in his upbringing and in the influence and example he found in his mother, Queen Margaret. The church played an important part in her life. She was renowned for her capacity to express her Christian faith in practical ways, tending to the sick, feeding the hungry and showing special concern to the poorest and neediest of her people. Something of that instinct and influence must surely have passed from mother to son, from queen to king. And as in those days so in these days. For our late queen was not just defender of the faith but a demonstrator of it in the way she tried to lead her life, by her own confessions striving always to follow in the footsteps of Jesus Christ, and not just in the public sense of lifelong duty and service for which she was rightly renowned, but in the small acts of kindness and thoughtfulness that characterised her late majesty's private dealings with people of every rank and station. All these centuries later hers too is an influence and example that now passes from mother to son, from queen to king. God save the king.