Reign Fall

Any questions I might have wanted to ask the Bishop about the reallocation of the Hornington patronage after the confirmation service last night – an affair, I fear, of rags and patches attended by a rather shockingly thin congregation in an unavoidably gloomy building – were rather put paid to by his announcement of the Supreme Governor’s death at the start of the service. That meant I couldn’t loiter and neither could he. ‘I’d better go and call the Comms department to find out if there’s anything I should be doing’, he flustered. Even I wished him luck with that.

Earlier in the day I’d taken communion to Don and Shirley and of course we talked about the Queen’s illness, which led to me saying that after a cup of tea I’d be going to town to try and find a black-edged photo frame, just in case. ‘I’m sure we’ve got a spare one’, Don said, and they had. Little did we know that Her Maj had already departed by then. It did save me trouble, that angel whispering in our respective ears.

After printing off some prayers and a photo, I scooted down to the church and set up – well, what shall I call it? I hesitate to use the word shrine. But I happen to have visited a variety of churches today and there is an irony in that a non-monarchist seems to have erected what appears to be the grandest ‘presentation’ for the Queen in any of them. Perhaps I am compensating in a safe way for my own conflicted feelings, combining admiration and even some affection for an individual (and certainly being moved by some aspects of her life and work) with lack of sympathy for the institution they were part of. I don’t feel inclined to hold any special services: that’s for people who are clear about what they think. But I am leading prayers at the Local Proclamation on Sunday, in lieu of the Vicar of Hornington who has with I imagine some relief gone on holiday. The Queen spent her entire life doing things that weren’t all that congenial to her, after all.

‘THERE ARE NO WORDS’, our friend Lord MaryBendyToy wrote on LiberFaciorum, but in truth there are lots, and lots. And then more. Looking positively at all the verbiage, the endless analysis of every aspect of this woman’s experience, it’s part of a national conversation about who we are and how we have changed over her long life. If the monarch expresses aspects of British identity, for both good and ill, then discussing the monarch’s legacy is a sort of talking therapy in uncertain times. Or any times.

I am not at all sure that churches will really be ‘the foci of mourning’ as our official guidelines from the Church claim they will be: today I’ve seen very little evidence of people going into them to pay their respects. Ironically the very qualities people admire most in the Queen resulted from the faith she was very open about, but which they pay little attention to. Even if Charles III is happy to take part in a Coronation along the same mystical, quasi-medieval lines as his mother, will that mean anything to the people watching it? I have told myself it helped to have such a public Christian bringing the Faith in front of the country repeatedly, and was grateful for it; but has anyone been listening for a long time?