Homage from the People : Repairing our Hearts (Part 2)
“This is an invitation to use the ritualised space created by the Coronation, to instead create and declare aloud your own Homage/Statement/Prayer with honesty and integrity to your own sovereignty, and to be witnessed in that making & declaring.” (from Part 1, linked here)
Being witnessed is powerful relational medicine. You are invited to place the words of your Homage/Statement/Prayer through a “Digital Repository”, to help in the witnessing of our words to and for each other at this time of ancient ceremony.
The Coronation is a ritualised moment of immense potency because, as said elsewhere, “all politics, all power, is at heart symbolic, resting on ancient foundations like a modern church on ancient monoliths.”
For the monarchy, its ancient foundations rest on the corpses of what were once potent symbols of public renewal and rebirth, from the “Green Man” on King Charles’ invitations, to Scotland’s “Stone of Scone” or “Stone of Destiny”, or the “Kohinoor Diamond” from India and now in the Crown of the Monarch.
What kind of long dark shadow is cast, when such ancient symbols for summoning forth a sense of sacred sovereignty in people are captured by a monarch, for enforcing a “power-over” dynamic? The Green Man, symbolically captured and brought into reality through the enclosure of land away from common-holding towards exclusive private rights granted to a growing gentry for their allegiance? Or the capturing of the Stone of Scone, representing colonial rule and practice against the Scottish people, evolving and exported into practices of enslavement in Africa and colonial rule and indenture in Asia, to help the Crown grow its wealth and entitlements?
The “Homage of the People” is sacred ceremony ritualised for a secular nation through the public of England, Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland and remaining Realms & Territories. It is the ritualised history of a Crown that continues its gesture of class aristocracy at a time when many making up this public are having to make a choice whether to heat their homes or feed their children, or have the existential angst of whether their country will even exist as sea levels rise.
However, whilst some commentators describe the Coronation as the “ancient rituals of our own lost British tribe”, there is not one but many lost tribes: those claiming descent from pre-Roman and pre-Norman histories; others like myself that are more recently born on British soil with “lost tribes” claiming descent from the lands of the colonised and enslaved.
This is the context within which a decision was made by those curating the Coronation that, the best way to modernise this ancient ritual and involve the public was to ask them to swear aloud that they will pay “true allegiance” to the monarch and its heirs, not only in voice but in heart too.
It might do well to remember the words of someone whose wisdom lineage stretches further back than the UK monarchy, Lao Tsu, to whom is attributed the following warning:
“Watch your thoughts, they become your words; watch your words, they become your actions; watch your actions, they become your habits; watch your habits, they become your character; watch your character, it becomes your destiny”
Can we use the ritualised moment of the Coronation to “watch our own collective thoughts & words”? If enough of us did so, might those thoughts and words, collected through the ritualised moment of the Coronation, help seed different collective actions & habits, perhaps even shift the trajectory of a collective destiny which we know in our bones is heading for a death spiral?
What if we took the Archbishop at his word, to really feel deeply into our own “heart and voice” and metaphorically placed our hand on whatever we might feel is helpful to steady hearts in crises mode, to ask for help through the ritualised formality of the occasion to make a Homage/Pledge/Statement rooted in our better natures beyond the stress and drama of everyday “just barely surviving”?
Would your hand touch through to the ancient symbol of renewal and rebirth that is the Green Man? Or touch into the wisdom of ancestors through the Stone of Scone? Or the wisdom of other ancestral lineages from other continents through the Kohinoor Diamond?
What if honest homage for these isles was something that could indeed, in the manner said by Lao Tsu, be reclaimed through our hearts into our thoughts and words? And from there shift the trajectory of our collective character as a nation sensing itself belonging to itself? What would we need to give to one another to know this as our true sovereignty?
“This is an invitation to use the ritualised space created by the Coronation, to instead create and declare aloud your own Homage/Statement/Prayer with honesty and integrity to your own sovereignty, and to be witnessed in that. The tapestry of Homages/Statements/Prayers will be shared back to those who so wish.
You might ask who am I to be calling forth this invitation? Well, unlike the Monarch I am a nobody, what has been called “lowborn” by others. Born in a deprived part of inner city Leeds and brought up on social security benefits and surrounded by the low-born expectations that poverty brings. However, whilst poverty led to some mental health challenges, I also “made it” to become a lawyer and am supporting the Good Law Project as consultant on a legal test case to force the Government to account for its utter lack of care for protecting our rivers from sewage dumping and pollution. I am also a friend to Dartmoor and the “Stars Are For Everyone” campaign that is trying to prevent the last piece of land on these islands at Dartmoor having its “wild camping” public rights removed and replaced with a “permit and control” regime held by landowners/gentry. I have given podcast interviews with Manda Scott (author of novels telling the ancient story of Queen of Britannia “Boudica”) about what it means to overcome the self-oppression that poverty brings, a self-oppression that feeds into feelings of worthlessness and shame and of not being good enough.
It has taken me a long time to find the medicine in being low born. I thus end with my Homage for repairing our hearts:
We the Public are the nobodies who matter more than we think.
