Scissorum-In-Memoriam

Weekly Newsletter 09 September 2022

This Week Merchant Taylors’

Queen Elizabeth II: A Tribute

the resignation of one British Prime Minister and inviting a 15th to take up those reigns of office. Her first PM, Sir Winston Churchill. She has given wise counsel to Prime Ministers, but let us not forget that when it came to horse racing, she would give you wise counsel on where to place your bets! And who can forget her star turn at the opening of the London 2012 Olympics with James Bond and her Corgi dogs on the red carpets of Buckingham Palace! Or her more recent tea party with Paddington Bear. She was fun, there was a wry wit and a lovely ability to reach through the crowd to touch its very heart. And I sense today, her reach is no less … perhaps for some of us, it is deeper now than it has ever been. We feel our loss. True faith in our Creator leads us not to want to lord it over others, but to seek them out and heal. To serve. True faith in our Creator does not fuel our ambitions to subjugate and manipulate, but rather invites us to ask who is my brother, who is my sister; who is my neighbour? And what can I do, to help? It is these insights that furnish our understanding of a Commonwealth. It is these same insights and principles that were the foundation of her reign and service. At the age of 21, she made a promise: I declare before you all that my whole life whether it be long or short shall be devoted to your service and the service of our great imperial family to which we all belong. Her life, it turns out was a long one. And she served us to the very end. We are humbled and we are grateful that she was our Queen. The world has wobbled upon its axis in these last 24 hours. But love will seek us out through the crowd; it will reach out and touch us, and it will help us find our way. God’s Love. May God’s love rest with her soul, her family, and with you all. Goodnight Ma’am. Goodnight. AMEN Reverend James Fields

The story is told of a kind man; in a crowd he senses that someone has touched the hem of his tunic. But he cannot see the face, her face as it turns out. He determines against all the odds to find the person and, as she has reached out to him, so he will reach out to her, which he does. The common denominator is faith, one in the other. It is a story of pilgrims together, people finding their way. A way of faith and faithfulness. Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II knew this story. And over the years as she found herself both physically and proverbially at the centre of great crowds. I can only wonder how she reinterpreted this story over the 70 decades of her remarkable reign. How many people have reached out to touch her. And in turn, how many has she touched, in heart and soul no less. She lived in such a manner that it has been observed, she shaped a century, helping her people to navigate through times of extraordinary change. Days of glory, but some of those days riven by fear or sadness. Her presence, in the crowd, always reassuring. But moments of intense solitude too, in churches and of course in her beloved Highlands. She was contemplative, but never a recluse. I read recently that the great souls in our world move slowly, they never run! In their very measured step, we sense an authority in which we may place our trust. We don’t have to catch up … they walk with us, at our pace … if needs be, through the crowd. The story of the man and woman in the crowd comes from the Christian Gospels. Elizabeth was a person of faith. With a remarkable candour and gentleness she would talk about her faith, in her Christmas broadcasts. You had the sense that she allowed her faith to inform her daily life without fuss. Perhaps when those government red boxes landed on her desk she would open them with a prayer, knowing the reach of her influence and authority. Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s! She would know that line from the Gospel too, but I believe Elizabeth more likely to have prayed for the gift of wisdom, than brute force. Time of course lends perspective and as we try to chart a course through days of quite unparalleled worry we might draw comfort in the knowledge that she had, as they say, seen it all! As recently as this week receiving

September 29 2017

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