Long Live the Queen: 1926-2022

The Queen has died, and Britain has been lifted out of the river of time, to rest on the banks of history and to wonder at our fate. Since her death at 96, announced on the BBC at 6:30 in the afternoon on Thursday, September 8th, the country has awoken to a world changed while it outwardly remains the same. The most significant part of this change is taking place within the hearts of the Queen’s, now King Charles III’s, subjects. The fallen condition of the human soul has been confronted with what it means to live a good life, one dedicated to duty and service to God and her people, each redeeming and sanctifying the other. It is too much to say that the world will not see her like again; there is within all of us the potential to aim for the higher moral life that the Queen embodied, if we engage in the striving that she did that is necessary to attain this. 

But it is true to say that the Queen’s death signifies the passing of an age, the bells that sounded out yesterday ringing out an old world and pealing in the new. What sort of world this becomes will be shaped by the actions of the families, communities, and the nation of Britain, led by its government and ruled by the new king. The grief is all-consuming, but this is only right. The Queen, our matriarch and grandmother to the nation is now gone, and she has taken something with her that we will only now begin fully to comprehend in the passing. Tears for her are just, and they are tears for what we have lost. But these tears will dry and reveal through clearer vision the glory of life itself, the goodness of the world shining through its fallenness, illuminating our souls.

"It is too much to say that the world will not see her like again; there is within all of us the potential to aim for the higher moral life that the Queen embodied."

For me, so overwhelming is the Queen’s death that it is difficult for a repressed Brit such as myself to express fully the depths of emotion I am currently experiencing, coursing through me like a raging torrent. The Queen exemplified the fidelity to duty, comportment, and strength of character that seem less and less the norm in both public and private life today. The Queen leavened the gravity of her situation with a quiet good humour that cut through from the exalted to the ordinary, elevating both in the process. My feelings are still raw, but this rawness, if expressed with the restraint for which Her Majesty was so well known, helps to dignify what would otherwise be unseemly.