What a monarch’s meeting teaches about politics and permanence

A monarch meeting a prime minister is a symbol of a deeper truth in a fleeting world.

Graham Tomlin

Graham is the Director of the Centre for Cultural Witness and a former Bishop of Kensington.

A frail old lady, the late Queen, rises from a sofa to shake hands with an approaching woman.

The longest serving monarch meets the shortest serving prime minister.

The Royal Family.

Just about the last constitutional act of our late Queen was to give an audience to Liz Truss, the (temporary as it turned out) Prime Minister and to ask her to form a government. The pictures of a frail but smiling monarch, weakened, but still doing her job, couldn’t help but evoke a mix of admiration and affection, especially when we look back and consider that this was just two days before she died.

But those pictures raised some questions. A Prime Minister, and a political party that forms a government, is normally chosen by the people. Queen Elizabeth was not. Neither is King Charles. She was, and he now is, our monarch by virtue of birth, something that can seem scandalous to republicans, and even to many who liked the Queen, or admire the King as decent people, but have their doubts about the monarchy. To our democratic instincts, it feels, at least to some, distinctly odd, a relic of a hierarchical past, a hangover from a less enlightened age.

But perhaps something more significant was hidden in that act. The idea of a constitutional monarch – a figure whose position is out of our hands, as it were – formally asking a politician to form a government - acts as a reminder to us that the will of the people is not the last word, or even the first word. It tells us that, important as democracy is (‘the worst form of government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time’, as Winston Churchill famously put it), there is an order, an authority that stands above and beyond the will of the people. When it has worked well, the monarchy, a source of rule above that of people and parliament, has always been a symbol and pointer to a divine authority that can work through, but essentially stands above all human government.

Because, of course, ’the will of the people’, and governments that claim to enact the will of the people, sometimes get things badly wrong. History, even that of democracies, is littered with tales of nations that have elected bad governments, or regimes that went on to enact a rule of terror in the name of ‘the people’, or where a majority has oppressed minorities. Republics of various kinds have ended up as oppressive and authoritarian. Even Hitler was elected in the first place.

That a Prime Minister only governs at the pleasure of the Monarch is a reminder of a deeper truth - that all governments are subject to a higher accountability.

Of course, there are good monarchs and bad ones. For most of our lives, those of us who live in the UK are fortunate to have had a very good monarch in Queen Elizabeth, and we hope and pray Charles will prove to be one too. Bad monarchs, whose personal failings and moral selfishness betray the office they hold, blur the picture. They tell a different story, that authority is in itself abusive, oppressive and not to be trusted. But at its best, the continuous institution of the monarchy has served as an anchor for us, pointing away from itself to an unchanging divine presence in the course of history. The fact that a Prime Minister only governs at the pleasure of the Monarch is a reminder of a deeper truth - that all governments are subject to a higher accountability, to a moral law they did not invent, a law that tempers justice with mercy, that our lives are subject to a deeper and more lasting reality than the shifting sands of politics or times and that there is an even higher loyalty than that which we may have felt to our late Queen, or to our democratic political system.

At the coronation, King Charles will be presented with an orb – a symbol of the world with a cross perched on top of it. It is a sign that ultimate power in this world belongs not to the King, or even the people, but to God. It is a reminder to the King, and to us, that he (and we) are accountable to an authority that stands beyond our own desires, or even the general will of the people. It is an authority represented by a cross – the symbol of love and self-sacrifice for the good of our neighbour, or even our enemy. It is one of those valuable reminders that stops any ruler from starting to think he can become a despot.

As our constitutional system has evolved, it is the custom that Monarchs don’t get involved in the nitty-gritty of politics and it’s vital that they don’t. That is left, quite properly, to the crucial hard work of democratically elected government and politicians, who have to get on with the important but messy business of governing, working out what to do about the cost of living crisis, how to respond to conflict in Ukraine, or how to respond to those fleeing to our shores from war-torn or poverty-stricken parts of the world.

The monarchy is a symbol of ultimate permanence, not the source of that permanence

Over past decades, Queen Elizabeth kept to this custom. She avoided expressing opinions on particular political issues and disputes because that wasn’t her role. Her role was to be a reminder that there is an order of things beyond the temporal, a moral structure to the world that is just given, not created by us, a structure that tells us that compassion, truthfulness, integrity, justice and honesty matter in all the calculations and compromises of political decision making.

The Queen’s death removed something steady and sure from our lives, as most of us have never known another monarch. Her death shook our sense of permanence, as the Archbishop of Canterbury put it at her funeral. Many of the vox pops we heard during the period of mourning pointed to that longing for permanence, the sense she gave of something enduring and reliable. Yet she was a symbol of ultimate permanence, not the source of that permanence.

As King Charles is crowned, he becomes a pointer to the unshakeable and steady presence that surrounds us, upholds us and all things - the God that Christians see revealed in Jesus Christ. Queen Elizabeth understood that and showed it in her own faith – the one aspect of her personal life that she was quite open about. And there are signs that King Charles understands that too. Faith in that God is meant to be the foundation of a monarch’s rule. It can also provide a sure foundation for our individual and less public lives too, a sense of permanence in the changes and chances of this fleeting and unstable world.

Explainer

Comment

Holidays/vacations

Mental Health

Psychology

Time

12 July 2024

7 min read

How to get the best time out of your downtime

The joys and perils of taking time out for summer holidays.

Roger Bretherton

Roger is a Clinical and Coaching Psychologist.

A pair of sunglasses beside a swimming pool.

Jakob Owens on Unsplash.

For the first few days of any summer holiday there seems to be something wrong with my brain. Having looked forward for months to the moment when I can finally down tools and get some rest, having yearned for weeks to be free of the relentless schedule of emails and meetings, the moment finally arrives and I, well… hate it. I’ve wanted to stop for ages and then when I get the chance, I don’t want to. The flywheel momentum of the to-do list somehow carries over into the holiday and turns the first few days into an obsessive nightmare of drivenness.

This usually manifests in the agitation of wanting to rest while being unable to do so. My schedule says stop but my mind hasn’t got the memo. Instead of gently sculling across the pool, I’m swimming time trials through an obstacle course of inflatable beds and dayglo sea creatures. My family is quick to remind me that the languid currents of the pool were designed for relaxation, not for achieving a personal best. ‘It’s called the lazy river, Dad, not Verstappen at the Nürburgring.’ It makes me laugh, but it doesn’t make me stop. Nor does it stop them shouting things like ‘He’s taking the apex’, and ‘Dad’s got DRS’ from their sun loungers every time I sluice past.

In the old days, psychiatrists used to call it the Sunday Neurosis, the mild state of agitated low mood that afflicted people on their day off. The inescapable feeling that we should be doing something on days when there is nothing to do. The realisation that we’re not quite sure who we are when we are freed from the daily demands we can easily resent. I don’t know what you have planned for the summer- a beach party in the Bahamas or an Airbnb in Bridlington or the classic post-Covid staycation- but if you’re planning to take a break of any kind there are a few things you should perhaps keep in mind to make the best of it.

If we must work full throttle to the final hour – we may have to accept that we’ll spend the first few days on holiday getting used to being on holiday.

First. Slow down slowly.

We have a tendency to think that life can change at the speed of thought. Just because our diaries say holiday, doesn’t mean that our bodies are working to the same schedule. The autonomic nervous system that governs our state of physiological arousal largely operates automatically. It isn’t synched to our Outlook calendar and can’t deliver relaxation on demand, no matter how much we would like it to. Psychotherapist Deb Dana likens changing our state of physiological arousal to taking a lift down a few floors. It takes time to move from a highly active state, to a more relaxed and connected way of being. It doesn’t happen at the flick of a switch and we only agitate ourselves more thinking it should. She says we should befriend our nervous system. Instead of impatiently asking ourselves why we aren’t more relaxed, we should simply ask whether we need to be this agitated right now. And if we don’t, accept that it may take us some time to adapt to a less demanding environment.

When it comes to holidays, this suggests we should allow ourselves some time to acclimatise. Our bodies don’t automatically relax the moment they hit the beach, or hike the mountains, or lie under canvas - they need some time. We can do this before the holiday starts, by slowly decelerating as time off approaches. Like a car approaching a junction, if we want to stop smoothly, we might want to hit the brakes long before we reach the stop sign. And if we can’t do that – if we must work full throttle to the final hour – we may have to accept that we’ll spend the first few days on holiday getting used to being on holiday. It may not make us a pleasure to be with, but we can at least understand that it’s just how our bodies work. We are not droids, there isn’t an off switch on the back of our heads.

On holiday, we can take time to savour the experience of living- to be in our bodies, not just use them.

Second, get into your body (and out of your mind).

There’s a reason people spend so much time on holiday exercising their bodies: surfing, climbing, walking, riding. And weird stuff too, that you’d never dream of doing at home. One time in Normandy we booked a hand-pumped locomotive and huffed/puffed our way up and down a railway line for an afternoon. If I didn’t have the blisters to prove it, I’d think I’d dreamed that. Why do we do these things? Because it feels good to be aware of our bodies. Even my laps around the lazy river had a certain logic to them.

Many of us spend most of our time in disembodied thought. We can sometimes feel like the involuntary participants in a workplace time and motion study, in which worth is measured by output. It doesn’t matter where you work – home, school, office, a boat, the woods – sooner or later a spreadsheet will find you. You can run, but you cannot hide your data. And the impact this has on us is that we tend to be more aware of whether we have hit our targets than we are of the toll these targets take on our bodily wellbeing. Just recently I was asked to support a management team going through a stressful restructuring. One guy claimed he didn’t feel the stress of it- he just got on with the job. But when I sympathetically suggested he might be paying for it with his body, the litany of physical ailments he produced sounded like the list of side effects in a 1980s pharmaceutical commercial. He didn’t think he was stressed, but his body kept the score.

Let’s face it, going on holiday itself is stressful. It’s ranked 42 on the Holmes-Rahe Life Stress Inventory, just above ‘minor violations of the law’. Apparently packing for Marbella is more stressful than being pulled over by the cops. But it’s worth it if it creates a space in which we can de-stress, a space in which we can remember that we have a body, a body that needs to be looked after. Of all the benefits of bodily awareness – the positive sense of how our body feels, not the crippling consciousness of how it looks – perhaps the greatest is its capacity to turn off the hyperactive judgement of our minds. On holiday, we can take time to savour the experience of living- to be in our bodies, not just use them.

If we are defined by our output, who do we become when our output drops to zero?

Third. Make time to connect.

What happens when we slow down and learn to live in our bodies again? We become open to connection: socially, emotionally, even spiritually. Back to Deb Dana. She notes that when we take that slow elevator down from the souped-up state of busyness to a more relaxed and open state of mind, we activate the ventral vagal nervous system. She calls it our ‘home away from home’- which seems especially apt for being on holiday. In this state we are happier to be seen by others and therefore to be in relationship with them. Whether it’s a conversation while walking, or an evening card-game, or a meal together, all of them offer a chance for us to dwell in our home away from home in connection with others.

One of the things that can keep us so obsessively busy, is that we are not always sure who we would be if we stopped. We’re not certain we have a right to exist when we’re not being productive. If we are defined by our output, who do we become when our output drops to zero? This is why for thousands of years the practice of rest has been enshrined in spiritual practices. Without space to detach ourselves from the hectic pace of life we will inevitably confuse who we are with what we do. The Judeo-Christian tradition called it sabbath, not just a day of rest, but a way of being in which there is nothing left to prove. Holidays can offer us that opportunity, if we are willing to take it. Because after all what do we call someone who becomes more relaxed and embodied and connected? I think: more human.