Will this generation grasp the restorative value and power of ritual?

One needn’t be a monarchist in order to be moved by the recognizable signs of grief that are common to all of us. In fact, one shouldn’t be.

But let’s keep thinking about what we are watching. Ritual has power; it is transformative and is meant to be. But it is also restorative. It permits time for deep breath and important reorientation — for people to say, “we have lived one way for a long time, considered things from this long-view, this perspective so ingrained we no longer really notice or appreciate it. Now, it may be time to consider other things; let us now think about it all, but calmly, respectfully and with openness to wisdom as we go about the duties before us. They are only duties, but let us give an example that even when one’s private world has been turned upside down, duty matters.”

Keep calm and carry on, indeed.

Because what we are seeing is so deeply rare and so fraught with grave intention, beyond anything. Is the drama of death and life and civil concerns, all wrapped within this strange, unemotive silence, touching something within them that has until now untapped? Is it making them feel curious about history, or attracted to a rhetoric of smaller feelings and larger words? Will any of it inspire them toward beauty, or feed an instinct for reliable sameness amid necessary change? Will they be struck by the strange reality we are witnessing, where the actions and affairs of a ruling class family with its own share of dislikeable miscreants are somehow deeply felt and shared by ordinary people (who, in regular circumstances, might not think much of them beyond their entertainment value)? Will they want to see more ritual — proscribed and followed rather than fiddled with and “fixed” to conform to passing times and trends — or will they decide there is no value, here, and thus no worth, no need for it?