Following the death of Her Majesty the Queen, I took a break from some of the more repetitive coverage to watch spellbound as a sober House of Commons delivered many moving tributes and personal testimonies.
Three stood out and helped clarify just what she meant to me personally as an interfaith minister and co-founder of Women for Europe. Barry Gardiner, Labour MP for Brent, referred to watching her Christmas speech as a family each year at 3pm. He made a point of mentioning the time, interestingly distancing himself from Jeremy Corbyn who mistakenly said he listened to her in the morning!
Gardiner referred to those who had spoken of her life as a pattern of duty and service, but he wanted to stress that “the virtues which in my view her life so manifestly displayed are what Christians call the fruits of the spirit: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, meekness, temperance”. As St Paul says in the Bible, “against such there is no law”. Gardiner ended by remarking on the unpopularity of integrity, suggesting this was something she exemplified, and for which we can thank God.
Duty, service and integrity
Jess Philips noted her surprise at the depth of emotion she felt at the news of the Queen’s death, saying she was a member of every one of our families – even a family like mine, a non-traditional, non-monarchist home. She described how we could all project our own lives onto hers and find something we could identify with whether we were traditionalist or modernist. Her experience feels like ours, and it feels like she is with us all.
Philips said that for her, the Queen was a feminist. She recounted the anecdote of the sovereign driving the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia fast around the Balmoral estate, at a time when women in his country were forbidden to drive.
Layla Moran said she felt the Queen had earned the respect and love of her people, despite not because of her title. As a Brit growing up abroad, she remembers the portraits. Living in Ethiopia in the 1980s, she described how people would gather as a community at the British clubs or embassy and see the Queen gazing down on the festivities from some ornate framed picture. She was always there, through time and space. For Moran, she was an icon, binding her people together.
My Queen
These three interventions led me to reflect on what the Queen meant to me. I was born in 1947, the year she married Prince Philip. Footage of that time always strongly awakens my childhood memories. I remember the Coronation, and the excitement.
More than that, I knew and felt that she was a European. French President Emmanuel Macron’s moving tribute confirmed what we already knew. Her fluent French had clearly charmed him and he, like us, had no doubt that Brexit must have shocked and upset her. Who can forget the blue hat with the stars she wore for the opening of parliament silently signalling that she was with us, she knew and could empathise with what we were having to endure.
But for me, the core of her humanity was this notion of the fruits of the spirit. Her service was because of her faith; her humility born out of her faith and her resolve due to her faith. It sustained her in good times and bad. She was not afraid, as are some of our leaders, to express it, to own it and to share it.
Her powers of leadership, revealed at a young age as a child during the war years, were awesome. Her first broadcast to the children of the nation during which she empathised with them about their separation from their families as they were evacuated was truly moving. She referenced Julian of Norwich, a medieval mystic, when he said, “All will be well”, saying it was the children of her generation that would rebuild the country and make it a better place for all.
An inspirational sovereign
I was inspired by her humility. She did not wear the mantle of ‘defender of the faith’ like her ancestor King Henry VIII, the epitome of sexist autocracy. In 1534, through the Act of Supremacy, he destroyed the monasteries, removing all Catholic iconography, including that of the saints and the Virgin Mary.
She was the defender of the faith – her Christian faith, but also the defender of people of all faiths, and none. The Christian teachings that she identified with were those of generosity of spirit, respect for all and a genuine impulse to promote peace, forgiveness and reconciliation. Who can forget her visit to Ireland in 2011 when she shook the hand of Martin McGuiness and made a fulsome apology for the wrongs that had been done to the Irish people? She did this despite the IRA assassinating in 1979 a maternal uncle of Prince Philip’s, Prince Louis of Battenberg best known as 1st Earl Mountbatten of Burma, and honorary grandfather to King Charles III.
What most impressed me about our Queen, as a woman and a feminist growing up in a patriarchal country and a patriarchal world, was how she modelled everything we as women were striving for, were asking for, were demanding for ourselves.
At a time when politicians and church leaders were all men, we witnessed a strong, young woman, determined and resolute, take on the challenge of her destiny and transform herself into a spiritual leader, both immanent and transcendent. A personification of the divine feminine that her ancestor King Henry VIII had hoped to eradicate.
A feminine role model
Queen Elizabeth has been an icon, a role model; someone who aged with grace, no nips, no tucks; her smile, her beauty inside and out has sustained us.
Seeing her grow old, with dignity and ease – until the last few painful months after the death of her beloved husband – has given women and particularly older women, confirmation that despite what is said about them, on Twitter or elsewhere, there is nothing they cannot achieve. Our older, wise voices can still be heard.
There will be a time when the monarchy will be discussed, but this is not it. So, I would like to conclude with a famous Buddhist saying:
“In the end, what matters most is how well did you live, how well did you love, how well did you let go.”
The Queen did all these things, and more. May she rest in peace and rise in glory.
