Anybody watching the new season of “The Crown”? I have to admit that I’m hooked on the Netflix series, but this season is particularly bleak. It seems all the Royal marriages are about to fall and watching them disintegrate is definitely “must see” TV! However painful, once you’ve invested this much, I mean this is season 5, you just must see it all to the end, no matter how much it all falls apart! One of the Royal relationships that is perhaps the most tragic is a relationship that “the crown” not only forbade but sabotaged, was the relationship between Princess Margarette and Peter Townsend. In the 4th episode of this season, an episode appropriately named “Annus Horribilis” (Latin for “horrible year”), after 35 years of being separated, Margaret receives a letter from Peter sharing that he is coming to London and would like to see her. This sets off all sorts of emotions for Margaret, both wonderful and disturbing. She realizes the love she had for Peter is still there, which is cool, but this loves also rekindles an incredible anger she has towards Queen Elizabeth for preventing this love from coming to full fruition in marriage.
At one point in the episode Queen Elizabeth’s home, Windsor Castle, burns down, and Margaret, still furious at Queen Elizabeth, storms into Queen Elizabeth’s office and bears her soul. As she shares her unbelief that the castle has burned down, she also posited that maybe someone burned it down intentionally. She then proceeds to share all the motives members of the family might have for doing that, including herself. Queen Elizabeth can’t believe that her sister would ever want to do that. But Margaret persists:
You don't think I have reason to burn down my sister's home? Why would you do that?
Because of what she denied me. Peter Townsend. What? Without sun and water... crops
fail, Lilibet. Let me ask. How many times has Philip... done something? Intervened when
you couldn't? Be strong when you couldn't be? Be angry when you couldn't be? Be
decisive when you couldn't be? How many times have you said a silent prayer of
gratitude for him and thought, "If I didn't have him, I'd never be able to do it?" How
often? Peter was my sun. My water. And you denied me him.
Who cannot feel Margaret’s pain here. She has every reason to feel the way she does and to be angry!
As I was listening to the podcast called “The Crown” that accompanies this episode (yes, I’m really hooked on all of this), the writers of the show are discussing this pain and they share this, “There’s something beautiful and touching about humans and the human condition in that we always go back and revisit the same conflicts of our lives in a new wrapping over and over in our life.” (The Crown podcast Season 5: Episode 4) Isn’t that interesting and so true. In some senses we are all constantly reworking, revisiting the core conflicts of our lives over and over again…just trying on new wrappings.
Our theme this year for Advent, is “where is your gaze?”. In a sense, this is what we do. We look at the same core conflicts in our lives…they don’t change, but what can change is the way we see them, the angle at which we gaze at them, the lens in which we use to filter it all. And in so many ways, it can be that just how we gaze at those moments that makes all the difference!
Rabbi Harold Kushner once wrote a book called “Who Needs God” and in it he writes this:
"Religion," writes Harold Kushner, "is first and foremost a way of seeing. It can't change the facts about the world we live in, but it can change the way we see those facts, and that in itself can often make a real difference."
And what Christianity tries to teach us is to see things, first and foremost, with a lens of grace. To go back into our lives and try, if we can, to paint into those conflicts a touch or whisper of grace, and by doing that over time, I believe, all of our “inner Margaret’s” can begin to see life in new ways and with a new hope. At least, that’s what I hope.
Your friend and pastor, feeling for poor Margaret and trying with all my heart to sew a thread of grace into my own core conflicts, Brook