Mourning Queen Elizabeth

‘This famous disciple of Christ, this public theologian’

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Sometime, early on in the 1980s, my mother took me to see the Queen. The Queen, if I remember right, was in Vancouver, British Columbia, in order to cut the ribbon on a public building, likely a hospital. And so I put on my one and only necktie and my wine-colored blazer — the same dapper ensemble that I wore to concerts and special events — and off my mother and I went.

We waited outside the new (or newly-renovated building), standing behind a barricade, mounties and dignitaries and other important folk moving in important ways around the barricade’s other side. And then, after maybe half an hour of patience cut with anticipation, the building’s doors opened, and out came the Queen.

We applauded. And the Queen walked slowly past us, waving, stopping once or twice to speak briefly to someone in the crowd or to accept a bouquet of flowers, which she would then hand to a dutiful assistant. Then she got into a car and left.

That is the whole story. There is nothing to it, really. And I have big feelings remembering it today.

A lot of folks have written and said a lot of things since we learned of Elizabeth’s death. How she was this thread of constancy running across the decades; how she was the only Queen whom most people alive today have ever known; how she married duty with kindness and sometimes even with playfulness; how there was a kind of liberation in her bringing the voice of a woman to a public conversation overrun by men; how — way less positively — she was a reminder of inherited wealth and status, of class, of empire; how she was a living link to a time that will not return; and how her death introduces still more change and still more grief into a moment when we have had altogether too much change and too much grief.

All of that is well said. Many of those things point at what it is that I sit with and what it is that I mourn as I remember seeing the Queen all those years ago, as I remember her reign before and since then.

To that list I will add two church-specific things that I am thinking about today.

The first is that the Queen was an Anglican lay person who was very publicly Christian and who had the capacity and the willingness to articulate her faith.

Consider her final Christmas message and the simplicity and directness with which Elizabeth spoke of the birth of Jesus and of how Jesus had shaped and guided her life. In a time when the public voice of Christianity is predominantly fundamentalist and predominantly anchored in reactionary politics, it is water in the desert to hear someone speak as the Queen did last Christmas and as she did so many times before that. I will miss her witness as a disciple profoundly.

The second is that there is a real sense in which the Queen was that most churchy of things, and that is to say that she was a kind of sacrament, an outward and visible sign. During her life, she was a sacrament for the many things that I named above: duty, kindness, empire, change. Today, she is a sacrament similar to ash on your forehead at the beginning of Lent, a reminder that, even in a monarchy that extends into its eighth decade, death exists.

And if our faith is true, then today she is also a sacrament of resurrection.

America does not have a monarch. That is as it should be. And there remains a sense in which Elizabeth was our Queen, in which, therefore, this is a time of mourning. For those of us who follow Jesus, and who follow him in the Anglican way, there is a particular shape to how we now mourn.

So, let us mourn. And let us give thanks for the life of Elizabeth. For this famous disciple of Christ, this public theologian; for this person who chose to be a sacrament for all of the beautiful sadness and complicated joy of this life; for this beloved child of God whom I once saw, fleetingly, all those years ago.

May Elizabeth rest in peace and rise with Christ in glory.

The Rev. Martin Elfert is the rector of Grace Memorial Episcopal Church in Portland, Ore. This post is republished with permission from Spokane FaVS. To reproduce this content elsewhere, please contact Spokane FaVS.