A Divine Destiny

 

Orchid named for Diana, Princess of Wales

“The people asserted their deep longing to feel at one, if only for today,” Warren Colman wrote about the days following Princess Diana’s death as crowds gathered in London parks and along city streets. “Tomorrow we will assert our differences, tomorrow we will return to the struggle to live together…. For today, just for today, we will take the opportunity to feel what it might be like to be together, to feel at one, to share an experience with everyone else.” It was the final days of summer in 1997, and the world was evolving, moving into a new millennium full of remarkable revelations. A future was emerging that would demand our attention.

For the woman who once declared that she “leads from the heart,” Diana’s death pierced our own. Perhaps this was Diana’s biggest gift to us: To give humanity a taste of feeling related and connected through the heart, to experience something tenderly shared, to have an opportunity “to feel at one” in a divided, divisive world. And to long for more.

Colman told of listening to many interviews during those days between Diana’s death and her funeral service, as people came together in public spaces simply to be together. “I think that the people who have come to be a part of it are part of it,” shared a local, fifties-something man who had congregated with thousands of others outside Westminster Abbey during Diana’s funeral. “Whereas before it always felt as though you were pure spectators to something else — it was what belonged to someone else.” The idea of being a part of something, a sense of belonging, intimately connected, was deeply present here — just as it was for me watching on television from over 4000 miles away. “Royal occasions were royal occasions,” the man in the park continued while balancing a baby on his shoulders, “and we were just subjects to stand by. But this, I think, has been different insofar as people haven’t just been spectators, they’ve been there taking part in it….”

“Diana’s death seemed to offer possibilities for reflection and perhaps even transformation,” Josephine Evetts-Secker wrote, also in When a Princess Dies, with people not feeling a need to be “exceptional or individual” but simply to be together. “‘I just had to be here, to take my place in the crowd,’” Evetts-Secker shared about one young woman interviewed amongst the peaceful, orderly masses of people assembled around central London that week. (“The mobilization of police, in anticipation of serious disturbances, proved unnecessary.”) “Some mystery had taken hold of the nation and beyond, with a palpable but inchoate sense of spiritual need,” Evetts-Secker added.

Something unfamiliar was indeed developing here. What appeared to have “taken hold” of people was the desire to go inwards, perhaps soothe an old ache stuck there and breathe in new life, then move back out into the world more open and available to connect with others. Diana’s death had shaken loose centuries of bottled-up emotions, new awarenesses were emerging.

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