A Significant Loss
FROM THE RECTOR
The closest I ever got to Queen Elizabeth was standing on a sidewalk in Cambridge while she and Prince Phillip walked down the street, waving to thousands of adoring subjects. I cannot recall why she was in town, but I do remember how special it felt to be even twenty yards away. As a seminarian in England, I prayed for “the Queen’s majesty” many times, and just this summer, when intoning the prayers at Evensong at Exeter Cathedral, I sang “O Lord, save the Queen.” She was not our Queen, of course, but many Episcopalians and other Anglophiles in this former colony of the crown have felt grief at her death as if we had lost our own loved one.
Where do this affection and kinship come from? For many of us, the Queen’s death represents the loss of something profoundly stable and familiar. Elizabeth had been on the throne as long as my own mother has been alive, and the world has a hard time imagining life with someone else wearing the crown. Despite all of the conflict and change that we have experienced over the last seventy years, Elizabeth remained faithful to her calling and to her promise to devote her whole life to the service of her people. Only in her death did she accept release from that sacred obligation.
Some around the world are not able to mourn the Queen’s death with unqualified gratitude and praise. Irrespective of her own actions, Her Majesty embodied centuries of colonial oppression and economic exploitation. As the one who sat on the throne, her identity cannot be separated from countless unsettling moments from the past. I am sure that scrutiny of her personal record would turn up at least a moment or two of cringeworthy imperialism, but I think her legacy as one who oversaw the modernization of the Commonwealth will rightly surpass those criticisms. Expressions of sympathy from former enemies like the leaders of Sinn Féin, unthinkable only a few decades ago, speak volumes about her character.
For those of us in the churches that make up the Anglican Communion, this death brings its own peculiar changes. I saw on social media an image of an old prayer book from the Church of England, in which the owner has updated in the margins the name of the sovereign five or six times as each monarch has succeeded another. Charles III is now the Supreme Governor of the Church of England, but what does that mean for the American descendants of the Anglican tradition? In the Episcopal Church, which stopped praying for the King’s Majesty during the American Revolution, the death of the British monarch has no official impact, yet the loss of a generational symbol of faithfulness is one that we feel.
I encourage you to read what Rowan Williams wrote this week about the ways in which the Queen fulfilled her divine calling with divine assistance. When we say the Baptismal Covenant and rehearse the faith of the church and the ways in which that faith shapes our lives, we respond to the five concluding questions with “I will with God’s help.” When asked if we will persist in our faith, when asked if we will repent and return to God, when asked if we will respect the dignity of every human being, our answer each time is a commitment to following Jesus but always and only with God’s help.
Following the ancient practice, we anoint with chrism those who are baptized just as their life in Christ begins. At the beginning of her reign, Queen Elizabeth, too, was anointed with chrism in the peculiar initiation rite of her coronation. Although I do not believe that the oil itself is the reason that Elizabeth or any follower of Jesus has the power to respond faithfully to God’s call, I do believe that the anointing of the Holy Spirit, which is symbolized and sacramentally conveyed through that oil, is what makes that faithfulness possible.
One of Queen Elizabeth’s greatest gifts to the church was her model of faithfulness. With her death, that living reminder of sacrificial service has gone from our sight, and that loss is surely something to mourn. She was not our Queen, and we did not know her personally, but her life of faithfulness was something we can treasure and something for which we can give thanks to God.
May Elizabeth’s soul and the souls of all the departed through the mercy of God rest in peace and rise in glory.
Yours Faithfully,
Evan D. Garner