Queen Elizabeth II's 90th Birthday

This weekend our nation and commonwealth gathers to give thanks for the long life and ministry of Queen Elizabeth II as we celebrate her 90^th year. We know that she still leads a remarkably full working life and we may well reflect today on how she has managed to thrive so long in such a demanding and public role.

This week I’ve been on a conference and one of the subject areas was ‘building resilience for leadership’. We could easily have used Her Majesty as a shining example of someone who has displayed a remarkable resilience in leadership; not only is she the longest serving monarch in British history, but also the world’s oldest ruling monarch; and of course during those years there have been trials and challenges.

But what is resilience? It includes the capacity to recover quickly from difficulties; a certain toughness and clarity of vision and role. Our Queen remains remarkably steadfast and committed to her task. But, resilience is more than its formal definition suggests. Resilience requires an ability to live in the future, as much as in the past. The Queen has been monarch during a time of great cultural and social change. Prime Minister David Cameron remarked, when in 2015 she surpassed Queen Victoria in the length of her reign, that she has been a ‘rock of stability’ and ‘the golden thread running through 3 post-war generations’. It has been her ability to remain steady and constant through both national, international and personal family crises that have been truly a gift to the nations that she serves and represents.

For example, she has embraced the future by taking an active role in the re-imagination of the British Commonwealth into the Commonwealth of Nations. She has been a moderniser in helping it to leave behind its colonial past and embrace a new way of mutual flourishing and togetherness. Similarly, she has embraced the multi-faith character of contemporary society and worked hard in promoting and enabling inter-faith relations. She has no narrowness of mind nor simplicity of thought, and whilst holding the most traditional and historic title in our land, she is able to live into the future. Hand in hand with this skill is her own deep and committed personal faith. A faith which in contemporary society has become more and more irrelevant, whilst for the Queen it has become more and more relevant.

The Servant Queen and the King She Serves looks more deeply into how the Queen’s faith has sustained and inspired her during her long reign. Rather than being an anachronism for her, the moment of her coronation, was a deeply moving and religious experience. She was anointed in her role and she has grown in the Spirit during her reign. Her quiet faithfulness challenges all of us to reflect more deeply on what sort of society we aim to be. How can her steadfastness be an encouragement to us in the face of continuing change and uncertainty in our culture, nation and world? How might her personal faith, accompanied as it is by generosity, hospitality and a deep respect for all cultures give us collectively a confidence to be ourselves, whilst not shutting down and closing ourselves off from external influences? 

Her Majesty provides each of us with rich resources with which we can walk steadfastly into the future, whilst drawing upon the richness and wisdom of the past. Her genius perhaps is to be a woman of both the past, present and future – a timeless figure, who truly endures for eternity.

God bless you your Majesty, may you enjoy your 90^th birthday celebrations and perhaps most of all – thank you.