A Mirror, Dimly

Reflections from a funeral on love, divorce and what a King cannot give away.

We drove to the funeral through the sort of summer that only lives in childhood memories.

The early morning promise of the school holidays. Leather car seats sticking to your legs. Running through the sprinkler on a browning lawn. Making a tent from white laundered sheets, and mum not minding that they got dirty. Orange squash. Lemon curd sandwiches. And the luxury of an entire life ahead of me, with no idea of the poor choices, misunderstandings and pain to come.

Don’t get me wrong, my life has been fine. I have not endured a tragic illness. I have never fled a war zone. I’m not starving.

But there is pain. Who can avoid it?

A funeral is a day to remember the one we have lost, to cherish what we have. But surely I am not alone in casting my mind over all the things I have got wrong.

This tendency of mine to squint deeply into a glass, darkly — or as the New Revised Standard Version has it, a mirror, dimly — was pronounced at my mother-in-law’s funeral, because I had offered to give a reading. 1 Corinthians 13 was offered back to me.

I’d like to think Elizabeth knew what she was doing when she engineered from heaven, just a day before the funeral, for me to read this particular passage. You see, I’m her first son’s second wife. I’m confident she considered me a considerable upgrade on the first version — in her words, I was a “miracle”. And yet she probably knew there were one or two things left for me to learn about love, to put it mildly, and I wonder if she was looking out for her fully-fledged, twice-married son.

Divorce leaves indelible marks — on your finances, your possessions, your appetite for love, on your psyche itself. It makes itself felt most of all on any children the marriage bore.

So when I read 1 Corinthians 13, I read it upon the request of the minister, to honour Elizabeth, and to instruct the congregation, including myself.

My husband’s family is my family. His brothers are my brothers. His children are my children. And yet they are also not. I have my own family. My first marriage and family is broken. My parents also broke their families. There were many marriages, in fact. This funeral, of all those I have attended, made me feel the fractures most acutely.

And widening my thoughts from this hot-June grief, I thought too of the sadness of these particular times. Families have always suffered; there was no golden England of old, not really, but have things ever felt quite so deliberately broken?

We have a government intent on trampling the sanctity of life from cradle to grave: puberty blocker trials on children, and now moves to grant legal parity between common-law arrangements and real marriages. As always, the children suffer most.

That a government would do this is dispiriting but not surprising. More telling, perhaps, is what has happened to the monarchy…

The Sovereign Grant report for 2025-26 carries a quietly significant change. Last year, King Charles was described as “Head of the Church of England and Defender of the Faith.” This year, he “protects the space for Faith within the multi-faith nation.” Elizabeth II’s job description, in her era’s equivalent reports, was plain: Supreme Governor of the Church of England. Her son’s runs to several paragraphs, covering charitable catalysis, the degradation of nature, social fabric and cohesion, and his “special role in bringing communities and faiths together.”

Well. God save the protector of the space for faith within the multi-faith nation.

It has been said that all cultures are not equal. Likewise, all faiths are not equal.

Other religious traditions contain wisdom, and moral seriousness, and passages of great beauty. As C.S. Lewis observed in Mere Christianity, they carry “hints of truth.” But 1 Corinthians 13 is something else. It is perhaps the most complete account of love ever written in its structure, language and demands. It is simultaneously demanding and consoling.

Although it is often read at weddings it is no romance, and I think it is better suited to a funeral. No comparative text in any other tradition reaches quite this depth, or holds together the psychological and the transcendent so precisely.

It goes, as you may know:

“If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels, but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. If I give away all my possessions, and if I hand over my body so that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing.

Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

Love never ends. But as for prophecies, they will come to an end; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will come to an end. For we know only in part, and we prophesy only in part; but when the complete comes, the partial will come to an end. When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child; when I became an adult, I put an end to childish ways.

For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known. And now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love.”

The King has signalled, through his palace’s own language, that the United Kingdom is not a Christian country, contrary to the evidence of our history, culture, laws and even his own kingship. Some have called it a constitutional crisis. Perhaps it is. But no noisy royal gong can determine whether we are a Christian nation or not. That is down to us.

I read those words at Elizabeth’s funeral and felt, as I always do, that I am falling short of them. That is why they are so important to read.