BBC Radio 4 2016-04-21

BBC Radio 4 2016-04-21

“My whole life whether it be long or short”. On her 21st birthday, exactly 69 years ago, Princess Elizabeth made a promise on television in 1947 to live a life of service to the people of the Commonwealth nations. She couldn’t have known what lay ahead which continues to be to this day a live lived as no other life is being lived on earth. The Queen lives one of the most interpreted lives on the planet; and is the recipient of variously huge projection, affection, obsession and threat.

The Queen has navigated the monarchy through decades that have seen an uNPRecedented pace of change. From working in the Auxiliary Territorial Service during the war to sending her first tweet in 2014, she has been active and formative through an age in which as she commented to both Houses of Parliament in 2002, “change has become a constant”.

A monarch is a product of a system of hereditary authority, that has become both more revered and more controversial in a century that has experimented with other systems of government and found them wanting. But although there is a system supporting the idea of monarchy, the radical and sacrificial aspect of this system is that it requires an individual human being to accept and find a way to embrace the life that is given to them, to accept with as much grace and courage as they can muster, the life that everyone else has asked them to live, and to find a way to perform their duty in a way that is possible for them. It is a system which fuses the personal and the political in a very particular way, which is why birthdays such as her 90th is a day, as she said in 1947, not only for private celebration but for “serious thoughts”.

In a society that increasingly often demonstrates an aversion to personal or professional long term commitment, the fact that this promise made has become a promise kept is counter cultural, incredibly impressive and for many, very moving.

I was working at St Paul’s Cathedral when the national service to celebrate The Queen’s Golden Jubilee was held. In shaping the service, we proposed reading one of the teachings of Jesus that appears in all the gospels, one of the golden threads that run throughout the New Testament. It’s advice for leaders: whoever wishes to become great among you must be your servant. Today, on her 90th birthday, her promise to serve is all the more powerful in retrospect; and now, as then, we are invited to embrace, with her, everything that lies ahead.