There are more than one kind of Republican in the world, and I do not mean by that the split between the anti-Trumpers and their treasonous opponents, for as we were reminded this week, in most of the world, the opposite of Republican is not Democrat, it is Monarchist.
This is not, as far as I know, a particularly divisive issue for the continental European monarchies. Monarchs in places like Holland and Sweden are generally well-behaved. There are a handful of claimants in places like Italy that generate a little buzz, though they don’t get much traction. Republicanism is a live issue in Great Britain, even more so among its former colonies, many of which still have the queen, or now king, as head of state. There are Republican movements in Australia and Canada, for example, but they are especially strong in the Caribbean and African countries of the commonwealth, countries that were the targets of particularly exploitative and racist colonial practices. The British were, after all, the chief beneficiaries of the Triangle Trade that moved slaves from Africa to the Americas.
Still, even the most diehard Republican has been measured if not completely silent on the death of Queen Elizabeth II, possibly out of pragmatism, but also possibly out of decency, for even if the House of Windsor and the royal brand have been tarnished in recent years, she was still treasured.
This should seem baffling to Americans. After all, we fought a war to gain our independence from the British crown and soundly rejected monarchy as a model for government. Our head of state is also our head of government, sometimes, except when he isn’t, which is worth reconsidering, both the explicit “he” and the broader question of our current two-party first-past-the-post electoral system, which seems to have failed completely.
Yet, for some reason, Americans are quite attached to English royalty. It may be that the American myth was initially forged by invaders from England, the theocrats of the Massachusetts Bay colony and the Royalists in Virginia, opposite sides of an English Civil War that saw the first King Charles lose more than just his crown.
It may be our alliances during the First and Second World Wars that strengthened the connection, where we fought by the side of the British and their colonies.
It may be countless movies and novels and the logical overlap when literature is written in a shared language.
An American has even married into the royal family for a second time recently, though the first time was to a racist and Nazi-sympathizer, and nothing about that story was particularly pleasant so we tend to avoid it.
My social media feeds have been filled with the late queen since she died, the new king, and all things British. I admit that while I have not watched “The Crown” or Downton Abbey, I am enough of an Anglophile to have paid attention myself, have watched some of the processions and remembrances.
Only one friend, a classmate from Divinity School, was contrarian, publicly noting that he didn’t really care about the whole thing, that he did not completely understand the American grief. And, of course, on one level, he’s right. Elizabeth Windsor was not our queen.
We were charmed by the James Bond bit for the London Olympics, by the Paddington Bear video for her recent jubilee, but we didn’t know her. The scenes of domesticity as this enormously wealthy working mother raised her family were both revolutionary and carefully curated, enough to humanize her without creating familiarity. Even the tsunami of our hyper-media culture hasn’t penetrated the Royal Household.
But any pastor could have told my classmate that grief is not logical, that it is often compound and complex, that it can be triggered by just about any old random thing, and that it isn’t even always for the person or thing we think is being grieved.
Elizabeth famously said that “grief is the price we pay for love,” not original words, but ones that felt right when she shared them after the attacks of 9/11. We saw that in a heartbreaking way as she sat alone during services for her beloved husband, her loneliness and grief compounded by her commitment to following the same Covid restrictions her subjects were following, while the Prime Minister at the time was hosting parties at Number 10 Downing Street.
Elizabeth’s grief for Philip was our grief for lost husbands, wives, partners, and the grief of her children and grandchildren is our grief for lost mothers and fathers, for the elders who are gone, leaving an unfilled space in our lives.
Many of us have never known another British monarch, and even for those who remember her father, seventy years is a very long time.
Let’s think about the cultural changes in that time. For example, she was on the throne when Alan Turing, the genius who helped break the German codes and win the Second World War, was chemically castrated for being gay and committed suicide. Today, Turing could get married.
She came to the throne the same year that Jonas Salk and his team had their breakthrough with the polio vaccine, an effort that had taken twenty years. The first Covid-19 vaccines were being tested just months after the outbreak began, and there were shots in arms less than a year after the pandemic was declared.
She was on the throne a decade before Mick Jagger and the Rolling Stones ever took the stage, and that man is Methuselah.
Her death is just one more change in an age marked by discontinuous change.
We can adapt to incremental change, even when it is monumental. Think here the difference between that old rotary telephone with the cord your teenager kept stretching into their room for privacy and today’s smart phones, with cameras and countless apps.
Discontinuous change is unpredicted, sudden, and shifts everything about our lives. From “there’s a new virus in Wuhan, China” to “all public spaces are closed until further notice” was a matter of weeks, and while we like to think everything is back to normal, of course it isn’t. Children have lost their caregivers and had their education disrupted. Crime, declining for years, has spiked. We have a mental health crisis like we have never seen, at least in our lifetimes. And lets not even get started on the ways the pandemic accelerated the accumulation of wealth and power and undermined our democracy as a demagogue politicized ignorance.
The Prophet Jeremiah knew a thing or two about discontinuous change, knew a thing or two about grief, as we heard in today’s reading from the book that bears his name, and especially in the Book of Lamentations, traditionally attributed to the prophet. He watched as his nation was destroyed. Judah wasn’t the once-glorious kingdom founded by David anymore. It had long been a vassal of neighboring powers. But at least Jerusalem still stood. The Temple of Solomon was still there on the mount, carrying every bit the meaning Americans assign to the U.S. Capitol, that members of the Roman communion assign to St. Peter’s or Muslims to the Ka’bah. Then, like that, the city was destroyed, the walls torn down, the Temple a smoking pile of rubble. If you were in New York City in the weeks after 9/11, as I was, you need only picture Ground Zero and realize that this is what is moving Jeremiah as he laments.
You cannot analyze, categorize, or quantify grief, and you cannot reason it away. Grief squashed down in one place comes up somewhere else, like a game of “Whack-a-mole,” and you do not have to justify why the smell of butterscotch pudding made you cry, or the sound of the bells, or the laughter from the neighbors yard.
The grief for Elizabeth is grief for those lost to Covid, grief for civility, grief for the sense of decency and dignity that used to serve as guardrails for our democracy.
Logic says “Hey! Those times you long for weren’t great for everybody.” Gay men got thrown in jail or left for dead against a fence in Wyoming or left for dead by a president who didn’t care that AIDS was burning through the community. People of color were terrified that if they entered a “sundown town” or even a white neighborhood that they would end up lynched, though if we are honest, that has barely changed, for they can end up just a dead, shot in their own beds, by the lynch mob with the badges. And while we still live under an oppressive patriarchy, women are far better off than they were in that romanticized past.
Grief doesn’t care about that logic. It is, as Elizabeth repeated, the price we pay for love, but it is also the price we pay for comfort, the price we pay for habit, the gap between change and adaptation.
And that’s okay. Grief is biblical. Even Jesus gets caught up in the grief over Lazarus, and in that story he knows he can and will raise the man from the dead. Lamentations are okay, are where Jeremiah was, but the walls of Jerusalem would be built again, the Temple would once again stand on that mount, and even after it was destroyed yet again, five centuries later, all the violence in the world could not shake the love of God that went with the Hebrew people as they fled Jerusalem, a love of God that flourished in Alexandria and Constantinople, in Zurich and Zaire, in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, in a difficult group of troublemakers fighting for the good in the Chemung River valley.
Grieve, for Elizabeth, for those lost to Covid, for those tortured and killed in Ukraine, for kids who commit suicide. Then get up and get going. Joy comes in the morning, and there is work yet to be done. Amen.