8am and 11am

Isaiah 40.27-31
Ps. 77. 1, 7-end
1 Tim 2.1-7
John 12.23-32

During this disorienting, paused time of national mourning, it feels as if all of us are quite literally in memoriam – living in our memories. The presence of the Queen in recent years, as her health has failed, has been less of an immediate experience, and more of a state, strengthened by memories of her past service, of her past appearance, of her place in our national story. There have been many stories in the past week, from the large-scale to the incidental, from the moving to the humorous, shared by people who had met her – my favourite was from the grower of a special kind of blue potato, exhibited at Chelsea, with which Her Majesty was intrigued. He sent some to Buckingham Palace with a message asking her not to peel them, or the blue colour would be lost, and received a note back saying that the Queen was grateful for them, and had noted the cooking instructions. But for the vast majority of us, who have either never seen her in the flesh or have only glimpsed her in the distance, she was perhaps an idea, more than anything else. She famously said ‘I have to be seen to be believed’, but as long as she was seen sometimes, by some people, the corporate memories were made. This, coupled with her faithfulness and constancy, is why we found her unchanging – why we somehow thought, even as she entered her late nineties, that she would always be with us, always be The Queen.

And so the shock of death, the interruption of memory-making, has kicked up all sorts of memories for each of us. Memories of our own past lives – of childhood and adolescence and adulthood lived against the backdrop of her presence; of our own milestones measured against hers; and of our own bereavements, and the interruption of memory and stability that they cause – the way in which these losses stop the laying-down of memories and can leave you for a time with a chasm where the memories used to be.

People who’ve just lost someone dear to them will be worried about remembering. I’m worried, they say, about whether I’ll forget how she really sounded, or how it felt to hug him. It’s visceral, this loss – the warm body has gone, and what is left is insubstantial and for a time bewildering. There is a desperation, a grasping after details, a clinging-on which accompanies loss.

The Queen herself understood this vividly, and was able to speak about it powerfully in the context of her faith. Sometimes, she had to do this as one from whom a statement was expected: as Queen, she needed to find words for situations which were beyond them. The events of 9/11, the 21st anniversary of which occurred last Sunday, presented particular horrors to families wanting to remember. Not only were the attacks sudden and terrible, but for so long, for so many, there was no news and no ending, and still, for over a thousand families, among them that of one of my university housemates, there are no bodily remains. Into this darkness, the Queen spoke, saying:

The love will have been enough; all those impulses of love return to the love that made them. Even memory is not necessary for love.

These extraordinary and powerfully comforting words do not name God, but of course for the Queen and for all of us who share her faith, the Love to which all love returns has a capital L. And in this short sentence, she encapsulates the work of Christ in redeeming all memory, even that which is absent.

When we are bereft, we might cry, with the Psalmist (Ps. 77), ‘Has God forgotten to be gracious?’ But this cry is of course a product of our own infirmity in failing to recognise that to God, everything is present – everything is remembered. He is always with us, so that whatever we are called to endure, all things have their being in him, for all time.

As we try to grasp at our snapshots of memory, at all the impulses of love that we have known, this can seem a distant and abstract idea. But it is made real in the stuff of our everyday lives, and especially through the bread and the wine we are about to consume. In the Eucharist, we give to God our possessions – our food and drink – and as Jesus receives and transforms them, as we become guests at his table, we realise that these were never just possessions – they were always gifts. Gifts given by him, and given to him, who gives them back to us as new life. As we do this in remembrance of him, we are given the grace to see that all our memories, whether at the forefront of our minds or in their deep recesses, are given to us for a season, not for us to dwell in, but for us to offer back. It is through the act of giving them away – of not clinging to them - that we receive them afresh.

And this goes, of course, not just for the memories we cherish, but for those which are painful or difficult; those which threaten to hold us in thrall or traumatise us; those which might turn us away from Love. These too are ours for a season, to be relinquished in return for our freedom.

All of this is made possible through the cross on which Jesus is lifted up from the earth: by this cross, he draws all human loss and sorrow down into the depths, from where, like the buried grain, it produces new life. As we are drawn to him, offering our love to the Love which made us, we see our physical world charged with his redemption, our memories woven into the light of endless life and an endless present.

So in the midst of all our remembering, when we feel the instability of loss, especially of the loss of such a central part of our national identity, we really need to remember one thing above all else: the unwearying, everlasting one, from whom nothing is hidden, by whom everything is held, to whom all love returns so that it can be given back to us in life which knows no end.

This is what T.S. Eliot, in Little Gidding, calls ‘a position of complete simplicity (costing not less than everything)’. His words speak to these days of remembrance and pageantry, of tradition and novelty, of the cycles of life and death and new life, of memory and hope:

So, while the light fails

On a winter’s afternoon, in a secluded chapel

History is now and England.

Within the drawing of this Love and the voice of this Calling

We shall not cease from exploration

And the end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive at where we started

And know the place for the first time.

Amen.