It occurred to me, after I had scattered a handful of earth on the small coffin, six feet below, that my world had changed forever. Not in any startling way, for the death of my adored great-aunt, about whom I wrote briefly last August, came as no surprise. She was 101, and had entered a phase of life where her daily existence revolved around sleep punctuated by brief waking moments of lucidity. Simply and quietly, she just slipped away.
There was never a moment when she was not part of my life, and even in her later forgetfulness she never failed to remember who I was. In genetic terms she was not really my aunt at all; instead, in a very Welsh way, she had been my long-dead grandmother’s best friend. Coming as a Land Girl to work on one of the family farms, she fell in love and got married; her own relations were so far off in Inverness-shire that on her wedding day my grandfather gave her away.
She was widowed, tragically young, only a few years later. She stayed put, in the place that she had made her home, and it was into her husband’s grave that she was lowered seven decades later. The gravedigger had to cut down trees to be able to access it; the little chapel to which the cemetery belongs closed decades ago. It is now a private house, set handsomely in a pretty little north Pembrokeshire village with the sea crashing on the rocks below.
I have no memories of my grandparents, and the unsettling thing about her death was that it deprived me of the last person on earth who had known them as equals, and addressed and referred to them by their names alone – which is to say without the titles demanded by public formality or familial affection and respect. With her death their world, too, has also come to an end – at least for me. I suppose that I must now, at last, be middle-aged.
I say all this because I think many people felt something similar when Queen Elizabeth died in September. She and my great-aunt inhabited the same span, although in vastly different ways. The memory of the First World War and the reality of the Second was the backdrop to their formative years; it was a generation whose youth was inevitably framed by themes of privation, fortitude, duty, service and constancy. Any Ukrainian knows what that looks like today.
The late Queen’s death represented both a rupture and a reckoning. Change is unsettling in many different ways, but when it forces us to come face-to-face with the tension between the values and ways of life that we long to see upheld and those that actually prevail, it is unnerving, too. His Majesty has had his hand kissed so many times in the last couple of months that he must be worried that it may well wear out. So much for strong and stable government.
“Fear God and the King,” exhorts the writer of Proverbs, “and meddle not with them that are given to change.” There are times when only the unauthorised Authorised Version will do, even when the poetry of its cadences surpasses the accuracy of its translation. Sometimes change is necessary, of course, but Lord Salisbury had (admittedly apocryphally) the best wisdom on the subject: “Change? Aren’t things bad enough already?”
I have long believed that anyone who professes actually to enjoy change is either mad or lying, or probably both. As a position I think it holds especially true when people actively seek to destroy things of enduring beauty and demonstrable value: old Euston station, dignified traditional liturgy, London’s last surviving gas lamps, proper ermine-draped coronations – the list goes on and seems to get longer by the moment.
Some change, inevitably, is necessarily to be anticipated. Advent urges us to attend to the reality of two changes that we know must come. Of the first, when the Church speaks of the debt of nature which we must all pay in the end, it teaches that “life is changed, not taken away”. Of the second – as St Paul reminded the early Christians at Corinth, taking them into his confidence – on the Last Day “we are not all going to die, but we shall all be changed”.
None of this makes sense, of course, without the greatest change of all: the Incarnation. The great feast of Christmas reminds us of the change instituted by the changeless God so that he might fully enter the human story and change humanity for ever. As St Athanasius put it in his great treatise De Incarnatione, “God became man so that man might become God.” God went where he did not need to go so that his people may go where they do not deserve to be.
Behold, the great Creator makes himself a house of clay;
A robe of virgin flesh he takes, which he will wear for ay.
Whatever changes this year has brought for you – for sorrow, confusion, or joy – may you have a holy and peaceful Christmas.
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