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Good morning. Many of us are following in spirit the seemingly endless procession to see the Queen lying in state in Westminster Hall. There – as at the beginning of the week in St Giles’ Cathedral - the Queen’s coffin is protected by bowed guards, like ministering angels, as one by one, and two by two, people shuffle by to pay their last respects. Time has slowed to a crawl. The ceremonies of death, this death at least, take time.

I’ve heard that some people these days are opting for minimalist funerals either to save costs or perhaps to fund a bigger wake. It wouldn’t be the first time there’s been a cutting back on the rituals of death. In the early Reformation there was a revolt against funeral masses and belief in purgatory. So Reformed funerals took place at night with no minister present to ensure there were no prayers for the dead. There was an austere theology behind this: no one should try to sway God’s inexorable judgement by praying for the departed. Even graves were unmarked to prevent superstition. But the heartlessness of it all quickly broke down and Protestant churches re-invented their funerals encouraging the bereaved to remember their own mortality. So the Prayer Book prescribes sombre words from scripture: ‘Man that is born of a woman hath but a short time to live…he cometh up and is cut down like a flower; he fleeth as it were a shadow….’

The queues, the bowed heads, the silences, the slow shuffle of feet. Human beings need time to process the fact of death. To feel its wounding blow, to see the coffin and recognise that there is no way back, to begin to adjust to life with a tear in its fabric. And it all takes time. I’ve been grateful for our media commentators and the way they have helped us to be part of it, remotely, even if we had the luxury of breaking off for a cup of tea or a gin.

During the second lockdown I spent a lot of time on social media and followed several monks and nuns as they shared their thoughts about God and prayer, sickness and suffering. One of them quoted these lines from the writer Nancy Stephan:

There are things that we don’t want to happen, but have to accept;
Things we don’t want to know, but have to learn,
And people we can’t live without but have to let go.

In our own process of grieving there is often a long time after the ‘but’ and before the ‘have to’. Many of us who have been bereaved know about that gap, that endless slow procession. That’s where we are as a nation today.

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