I was going to write about evil today, I had some notes ready. Then an event yesterday led me to preclude the topic until next week.
The Queen is dead. Queen Elizabeth II reigned for 70 years. You have heard many of the thoughts, and there is much being written both on her reign, and the scope of history, the changes in the world during her reign. One news column this morning proclaimed in headline what many people are thinking, “Queen Elizabeth II: The One Constant in an Inconstant World”.
Christian theology that is hopeful, rather than divisive or fearful, has an expansive view of prayer. Prayer is something that is joined, something that is ongoing, something that is bigger than any one of us. Christian scripture tells us that the Holy Spirit intercedes for us, interpreting our groanings, the longing and concerns that we can’t even articulate to ourselves. The love in the Trinity is a kind of prayer and our prayers are joined to that. We are invited in.
When someone who has been such a constant over so much of recent history dies, very many people around the world are led to prayerfully consider the breadth of time and their place within it. I have seen comments from people who remarked that, “she has been the Queen for all of my lifetime.” Of course, that is true for most people in the world. You may have heard some commentators remarking that "we thought that she would live forever.” I don’t think that anyone actually thought this. She was, after all, a 96-year-old woman. The fantasy was not so much that she would live so much longer. Instead, the prayer was to consider how even those things and people which seem so constant, are subject to the realities of time and mortality.
So, one of the things that people carry, in consideration of such a death, is a kind of mental slideshow of their lives. For those who are well into adulthood, even those considered “old,” as images of the life of Queen Elizabeth II are displayed, memories of your own life are brought to mind. As you consider that countless people are remembering this way, you can wind up joining in a prayer, interceding on behalf of one another. You can remember and reflect not only upon your own life, but upon the lives of others. You can pray for those who you may never have known as they remember. Many people are pointing out that the Queen reigned over an empire marked by colonialism and violence, by the subjugation and oppression of many people in the name of the Crown. In acknowledging such truth we can recall that, for many people, memory contains suffering and even terror. Prayer does not have to be simple and tidy. It can lead us to admission of wrongdoing and desire for repentance.
In his book that is out this month, How to Inhabit Time, James K. A. Smith writes a beautiful invitation to life-giving concepts of time. He recalls the old monastic term “memento mori” (remember your death) and offers another concept that can help us to live fully in the life that we do have. Smith’s entire book is a call to what he terms, “memento tempori.”
“Remember you are temporal. Keep your history daily before you. Remember there is a future after the sand runs out, and that future is already bleeding into your present. Dum spiro spero: while I breathe, I hope.”
Smith goes on to cite a German word that he calls wonderful, it is Heilsgeschichte and it means, “holy history.” We each get to be part of something bigger than us, the holiness is in the “all-ness.” We can live fully because we can let go of the terrible fantasy that we are, in and of ourselves, eternal.
Queen Elizabeth on a visit to a family farm in Canada (1970). The Queen is third from the left, seated in the kind of deck chair from that era that many of us remember.
As you take in the scenes of people in England gathering after the death of the Queen, you might also be reminded that there are so few examples of truly collective celebration and mourning. So much is divided in our world according to various loyalties. People may mourn the loss of a political figure or a sports star, but much of that remains partisan, split apart even with a nation.
The Queen was largely non-partisan and apolitical in her reign. There are still some divisions, to be sure, there are republicans and monarchists. Largely, however, the marking of the death is national, even beyond national.
However we might feel it, we can recall that our lives are truly connected to the lives of others and that prayer is an invitation of joining. We mourn and celebrate, we grieve and cheer WITH others as we reflect upon our own individual and familial history. Prayer itself is initiated not by human agency, but by divine agency. Bound by the restrictions of time and mortality we seek to know and to reflect the love of One who is above time, of One who entered time but remains unbound by it.
As a song and prayer by Rich Mullins asked:
"(Would) You who live in eternity, (please) hear the prayer of those of us who live in time.” Amen.
I’ve entered into that ongoing prayer for you, praying for gratitude and healing memory as you reflect upon the span of your life, lived in this particular time, sharing some of the times in which Queen Elizabeth II reigned on the British throne.
From Rich Mullins song, “Hard to Get”:
You who live in eternity
Hear the prayers of those of us who live in time
We can't see what's ahead
And we can not get free of what we've left behind
I'm reeling from these voices that keep screaming in my ears
All the words of shame and doubt, blame and regretI can't see how You're leading me unless You've led me here
Where I'm lost enough to let myself be led
And so You've been here all along I guess
It's just Your ways and You are just plain hard to get.