Mother of our nations
Revised text of a homily preached for the Requiem Mass of Queen Elizabeth II at St Albans Church, Tokyo, 11 September 2022
I hadn’t expected it to hit me so hard. I suspect I’m not alone.
Yes, we can all remember times when other great national figures have died, and as it’s almost become banal to say, where we were when we first heard the news. Sometimes, to be honest, the great national - and even international - outpourings of grief for a great man or woman whom I knew only from a distance and through layers of media filtering have, I must admit, taken me somewhat by surprise; left me feeling somewhat outside the collective mood.
This time was different.
I suppose to the citizen of a republic, a monarch may seem a very remote figure, sealed off from the people behind layers of tradition, ensconced in palaces and castles, ermine and crowns. And yet, when I heard the news first thing Friday morning, though I’d never been closer than about 100 metres to our late Sovereign, it felt as though I had lost someone I had known my whole life.
In light of the wars and hardships going on around the world today, I realise that the heartfelt grief of so many of my fellow British and Commonwealth subjects for the death of one person, apparently so remote from our everyday lives, may seem odd, even egregious to some. But I make no apology for that grief. I can’t – because I share it. But I can at least venture to explain it; to cast on our grief the light of the Gospel, the treasure of faith received by the English Church of which Her Majesty was Governor, under Christ our Head, and in which she personally believed with fervour. Not to explain it away, though, not to dispel the gloom, or wipe away the tears - because they have their proper place, and to mourn is human - but rather, to find among the gloom and tears a deeper hope, a deeper joy, which goes beyond just cheering or chinning up, and which had such a manifest hold on our late Sovereign Lady.
So, why such grief at the death of a Head of State, whom most of us never even met? Yes, seventy years is a long time, and yes, for almost everyone today, Her Majesty has always been part of our living memory. But I don’t think longevity alone explains our affection: more like that usually reserved for a family member. Around the Jubilee celebrations, commentators took to describing the Queen as our “matriarch,” like a mother or grandmother of our nations, and that seems about right. I say that with qualification, because the Queen was of course part of a family in the literal sense, the Royal Family, and I would not want to compare their grief to ours. We should pray for them and especially for King Charles, as he prepares to shoulder a heavy and lifelong responsibility, along with his Queen Camilla and the Prince and Princess of Wales. We cannot presume to share their depth of grief.
Even so, there is something to the idea of the monarch as head of a family of nations. You don’t choose your parents; well, you don’t choose your monarch, either. Nor does our monarch choose us. We are stuck with one another, whatever comes, and to be sure, a lot did come, good and bad, for us to face as a nation during Her Majesty’s reign. Yet, with the help of God, she faced it all with us. She stuck with us. She took up her Cross. And she never gave us any reason to fear that she might do otherwise, that she might decide she’d had enough, give up, try something else: not even in wartime. The Queen was there, always, dependable, stalwart. Bound to her office not by mere consent or contract, but by blood, by oath, and above all, by the sheer grace of her anointing by God.
There is something very natural, very human about a monarchy. That’s because monarchy is rule by a family, and we are fundamentally familial creatures. Even if we don’t have a family of our own (or perhaps worse, have a family we wish we hadn’t) we can appreciate the commitments and loyalties that the family is at least supposed to represent. That makes the monarchy a very human institution, and the Queen surely made it all the more human, all the more personal, for many of us.
And yet, for the Christian, nothing can be merely human or merely natural. In Christ, God became human, so that humanity might become divine. The human reflects and mediates the divine; the natural is a vessel for the supernatural. So, to borrow St Paul’s words, we can turn the eyes of our souls from visible things to invisible realities: from such human institutions as Crown, kin and country, to the heavenly Kingdom, to the brother- and sisterhood of the saints, and to the Divine King Himself, of which the things of this world are but images reflected in a glass darkly.
The monarchy reflects something of the deeper reality behind human institutions. Dimly bearing the image of the heavenly kingdom, it represents an ideal for nations, not as loose confederacies of atomised individuals, valued by economic output, connected by mutual convenience for as long as it lasts, but something much better: as a great family of persons, whose identity is found not despite our relationships to one another, but precisely in them. And these relationships are things you cannot see: St Paul’s invisible things.
Even though we can’t see them, relationships are what constitute reality. Her Majesty has led a family of peoples whose relationship, at its best, transcends divisions of blood and race – and so gives us a flickering shadow of the kinship known by the citizens of the Kingdom of Heaven, in whose company the Queen will surely rejoice. For she is far closer now, than we who are left behind, to the invisible heart of reality: to God, our Heavenly King; One and Three, Father, Son and Holy Spirit; relationship in Oneness; the indivisible, inexhaustible ocean of love, in whom all things live and move and have their being.
May we, amid all the division and instability of this world, keep our eyes fixed there, where the unity and lasting joy which the world so sorely needs in all its present turmoil and division are eternally to be found. For while the world spins, the Cross stands fast.
May our King be as sure a sign of heavenly unity, stability and permanence as his late and beloved mother.
For there, in heaven, is the hope; there is the joy that Her Majesty knew and wanted to share with us. And share in it we can: at the altar, we can share in the heavenly banquet, the food of angels, the living Body and Blood of Our Lord whom we see now only dimly in sign and shadow, but our late Queen approaches face to face.
May she rest in the peace – and above all, the joy – of all God’s saints and angels.
Amen.