I have waited some three days now to gather my thoughts and prepare my pen to offer a fitting tribute to her late Majesty. But I fear I have waited in vain. Grief comes to us in many guises, and we can but clutch at straws in trying to grasp at its complexities. But how much more so upon the death of a much-loved sovereign, of someone in that unique position of having been such an immutable and axiomatic feature of so many of our lives, and yet whom but a few of us knew personally. Our modern, iconoclastic age has not bequeathed to us the apparatus to understand or cope with such an occasion, and such a grief. And indeed, many will have been struck by the absurdity of a society so zealous in its progressivism, so militant in its pursuit of an all-encompassing meritocracy, now nonetheless forced to observe age-old traditions and to pause its hurried life to mark the death of a woman who occupied a position, and fulfilled the duties of a role, that few had not come to regard as at best archaic. Yet the outpouring of grief, and the genuine sense of solemnity that have followed the death of the Queen, speak of a society that has still, in spite of itself and all its propaganda, an attachment to the ideals of majesty, beauty, and order that underlie the institution of monarchy. Perhaps what Louisa May Alcott once called ‘that reverence for titles that still haunts the best of us’ survives more robustly than we might have supposed.
I had begun to assume that the popularity of her Majesty stemmed almost entirely from a kind of quaint curiosity directed towards the relics of bygone times – the same kind of curiosity that seems to drive the popularity of period dramas and historic novels. To view the monarchy as a tourist attraction, an old-fashioned curiosity, or a product we might buy into – in short, to have an American view of it – appeared all the rage. But the reaction to the death of the Queen and the accession of the King seems to reflect a genuine belief, and a widespread one at that, that something sacred has occurred, and is occurring. That is profound, something to pause and take stock of in an age otherwise so bereft of the sacred, and so mired in all the social and ethical havoc that that has precipitated. If we can believe in the majesty of our late Queen’s office, and in the sacred weight of her son’s accession, then perhaps we can find it in ourselves to believe in the sacred character of Christian worship, or the rhythms and patterns of communal and familial life – and, ultimately and more importantly, in the majesty and awe of God himself, and of Christ his anointed King, the one by whom and through whom all earthly rulers have their authority, as we were reminded by the accession council yesterday.
On this I believe the church to be missing something significant. We have told ourselves that we live in a sceptical age, one in which few people are ready to believe the Christian faith, with all its appeal to the spiritual, supernatural, and divine. But that is to get the wrong end of the stick. Ours is a secular age, yes: one in which, in the name of liberalism and twisted ideals of freedom, we have shorn from the structures and values that are the stuff of daily life the transcendent ideals that gave to us meaning, moorings and direction. I mean that with respect to the church and religious life, of course, but also in regard to the ordinary and earthly events and patterns that mapped out and, at their best, sanctified the lives of our forebears: marriage, birth, death, sex, harvest times and seasons (and much else besides). These patterns only made sense if life was a gift – that is, if there was to humankind a giver of all that shaped us as we are, and who by his very nature thus stood above and beyond us. But it is the essence of our first, and perhaps our only sin that man desires to be like God; that he believes the humility which grace demands as its only sacrifice to be actually beneath the one who in reality is a mere creature, though the apogee of the created order. That pride took the fruit from its forbidden tree; it has built towers stretching to the heavens, and myriad empires and civilisations that are now, in the partial realisation of divine justice, mere dust and decay, around which stretch the ‘lone and level sands’ of Shelley’s famous description. And it is the root of our own society today. The animating principle of western modernity is the deification of man: and the price of every successful vaccine program, of every comfort we add to the expected standards of our lives, redefining poverty in the process, of every act of ‘emancipation’ from the strictures of our humanity, is a depth of existential suffering that, try as we might, we cannot seem to overcome. We would have ourselves the makers of the worlds. But we have realised all too late that the creator cannot be the created, that for us to build our world is for us to exist askance of it, to be exiled from it even as we attempt to dwell within it. The price of autonomy, in short, has been our humanity. For our heads were never meant to bear the crowns of gods.
That is the essence of our secular age; but it has not rendered us sceptical. For there is at the heart of our society a longing for man to return to his place in the created order, as the proliferation of books on nature and naturalism attests. Of course, these books are at best nostalgia, like the fishmongers and greengrocers that have sprung up in the wealthy, middle-class parts of English cities: only a mankind that has irrevocably divorced itself from the created order would require so many books reminding itself of its place in that order, just as only the wealthy can hearken back to a time when it made economic and social sense to eat food produced locally and organically. The experience of being in the world, in short, has become just another product that the free market has produced for our amusement and consumption, something that I can opt into as a rational agent, an imperious ‘I’ estranged from the substance of my world. But whatever their inconsistencies, these trends reveal a desire to return to a time in which life was given, not produced; defined, not self-determined; a time in which the human will was clothed with the dignity of communal life and mapped by the contours of obligations past, present, and future. This is where the apparently menial (growing my own beans and cabbbages) meets the transcendent (the Eucharist, a marriage ceremony), though such a paradox ought not to surprise the Christian reader. In both cases I lay aside the tyranny of my own will, and receive from the world and, particularly in the case of the sacred, from God – and in so doing, I rediscover my proper place in the cosmos.
This is why, I believe, there has been such an outpouring of grief and emotion upon the death of our Queen, and such attention paid to the accession of our new sovereign. If volition is all that can define our lives and beliefs, then all that we are in for is a cold, naked solipsism. But the regalia of monarchy, forced upon us by the death of a sovereign, is attractive precisely because it is intrusive. It provides a force outside of ourselves that can shape us, relieving – if but for a time – the otherwise unbearable weight of self-determination from our shoulders. The widespread affection shown to her late Majesty, and the fondness with which her memory is cherished – even Polly Toynbee is grieving – reveals that people are not only willing and capable of believing in something beyond themselves and their choices – something transcendent – but are positively crying out for it.
Ours is not a sceptical age. Quite the contrary: it is an age which, abiding in a world evacuated of all the contours of life, sacred and profane, that have governed, shaped, and chastened us in times gone by, is animated by a strange, even a childish credulity. People who have no real reason to believe in anything more than an exclusive naturalism, a world merely of matter in motion, nonetheless find themselves believing in the apparent majesty of a mere mortal, of a woman in her 90s at that, and flooding in their thousands to offer their platitudes of condolence upon her passing. As the growing body of work on ‘social ontology’ makes clear, finding any reason to believe in such institutions as make up the fabric of our society as the law, monarchy, or democratic elections, from the stance of an exclusive naturalism, without appeal to the sacred or divine, is a daunting task indeed. (That is why John Locke, otherwise the darling of liberal political theorists, could not extend religious toleration to the atheist: for him, atheism rendered obsolete the bonds and obligations that are the bedrock of social life.) And yet the average person on the street is more than willing to lay aside the naturalism they otherwise maintain in order to place their hope and affection upon claims to transcendent ideals that, within their worldview, have no basis whatsoever. The origin of such naïveté is the flattening and desacralising of the world that I have been describing. In a land flattened by the bulldozers of human ambition, the smallest of molehills seems to provide all the topographical excitement one could want.
And yet we the church know where the mountains are to be found; in a world of spinning compasses, we know where true North is. We have no need of empty platitudes, because we know the living God: the God who calls us to his worship, and who in Christ has given us the certain and sure hope of redemption and the glories of resurrection life. And yet the reaction to her Majesty’s death ought to give us cause to pause and examine ourselves. In recent decades, evangelical churches have placed a significant emphasis on churches being accessible places. Much of that is praiseworthy, and it usually stems from a laudable focus on evangelism and on making all people feel welcome in our churches. But in our efforts to win the world, to be sensitive to ‘seekers’ and outsiders, we have made the church look less different to the world around us than thoroughly biblical worship, the worship of our forebears, ought to make it. Our ethics and doctrine we have sought to maintain, and that is commendable. But in the last few decades the patterns of public worship have been rewritten in the name of accessibility. The tone of worship has become casual; our prayers rarely bespeak the majesty and glory of the God to whom we speak; our sermons have to be littered with jokes and anecdotes because the mighty truths of Scripture are considered too intense not to be mixed with the banal; and our singing has more come to resemble a pop concert than the holy songs sung by the saints of old. But that is not the way of worship enjoined by the Scriptures. ‘Let us offer to God acceptable worship, with reverence and awe,’ the writer of Hebrews tells us, ‘for our God is a consuming fire.’[1]
It ought to be reason enough to worship God with profound reverence simply that he commands us to do so. And yet my point, as I close, is this: we also undermine the mission of the church if the shape of our worship does not adequately reflect the God whom we worship. The British monarchy has survived precisely because it has maintained a sacral aura, a sense of its otherness; by the same token, it has come closest to demise when scandal has reminded us that even the most lauded of earthly rulers have feet of clay. The reason is that mankind was made to worship, was made for the sacred; and all the more so in an age which has impoverished us by flattening and desacralising our world. We long for the transcendent, for that which might return to us our humanity, our place in creation, precisely by virtue of its otherness. Though like a petulant child we might deny what we know, deep down, to be the good that we crave, the extent of our longing for that which transcends us is made clear in events such as those of the last few days. We were made for God. It is the church whose worship is most Godward, most barely concerned for its appeal to the world, that will, paradoxically, be the most attractive, and whose mission will, in God’s goodness, most assuredly prosper.
The Fourth Discourseman
[1] I am aware that this position on the nature of ‘worship’ is fairly different to that held by many churches today; I hope to return to this theme, offering a defence of a Reformed theology of worship, in a future essay.
The Four Discoursemen 