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.

Continue reading book excerpt on Medium

{Visiting Another Chapter...}

I'm sharing another chapter, divided into several parts, from my ongoing and long-in-the-making book...tentatively titled The Spiritual Mission of a Princess. Enjoy!

..............................................
CHAPTER SIX

Fear and Loathing of Women 

{Part One}

“Diana appeared at the end of her life as a new and confident workingwoman with a political agenda,” observed Dr. Colleen Denney in her study of Princess Diana as a cultural and feminist phenomenon. And during this same time, as the social and political culture was becoming more egalitarian, Jungian professor Andrew Samuels wrote that “Diana emerged as a new kind of leader...she became the visible aspect of long-standing alternative ideas about leadership, which had been dubbed ‘feminine’ or ‘maternal’.” In his exploration of Diana’s influence, Samuels considered the “changing of relations between politicians who lead and citizens who are led is on any thoughtful contemporary agenda, and the Diana phenomenon may be understood as part of this move.” 

Diana was thrilled when the young Tony Blair and his Labor Party won a landslide victory in May of 1997. “His victory,” wrote Tina Brown, “after eighteen long years of Tory dominance, was welcomed with the euphoria of a new dawn. A young, modernizing, and empathetic Prime Minister and his independent, high-powered wife were pledging to end the corrupt, uptight ways of the crusty old Establishment.” And best of all for the Princess, Blair appreciated and supported her! 

Tina Brown talked about a lunch with Diana in New York following the “wildly successful” Christie’s charity auction of her dresses—just two months before the Princess’ death. Now divorced and free of many of the restrictions of the monarchy, Diana “was so self-processed, so exhilaratingly focused,” Brown shared. “She saw Tony Blair’s election as Prime Minister as a broom that would sweep her old life away and entrust her with a humanitarian mission.” Diana was ready to go to work! (She was just back from Angola with the Red Cross and her famous land-mine walk—her “purest synthesis of courage, calculation, and brilliantly directed media power.”) After that lunch, Brown thought Diana “a woman of substance who had found her future.” Or as Elizabeth Gordon expressed about Diana in When a Princess Dies: “It seemed that in the last months of her life she emerged not only as a ‘woman in her own right’ but also a person with a sense of her own vocation and purpose.”

As a member of the royal family, Diana had been “well-trained” in keeping a busy work schedule (the Queen had more work engagements than days of the year.) If Diana had lived, what kind of “workingwoman” would she have been? Diana was passionate—and fearless—about her work on behalf of land-mine victims and AIDS patients and she knew how to use her star power to get media attention for her causes. Brown wrote in The Diana Chronicles that Tony Blair told her “he had Diana in mind to boost the Africa initiative on overseas aid and debt cancellation that became the Millennium Campaign.” Like many modern, high-profile women who were in leadership positions in business or politics or working with social-awareness campaigns, Diana was used to being criticized, even maligned, and held to a different standard. She also knew of the backlash when a woman stepped on the toes of powerful men or stood up to the patriarchal establishment. But she was enjoying a high-approval rating with the public and the press at this time—and she needed that to thrive, because in Diana’s personal life, as Tina Brown explained, “love, or the lack of it, always dragged her down.” 

Would she have been willing to risk losing the public’s admiration or the possibility of a stable love relationship by taking a stand unpopular with her public? What would Diana have put on the line as scores of working women of her generation did—and like women of today still do? Like the women, and you may be one of them, who put themselves in the line of fire just because their “ambition” and ability and intelligence and vision placed them in an often-edgy position of telling men what to do. 

How would Diana have fared in the post-2016, Trump-led backlash against outspoken women—even pretty ones if they didn’t favor him—who threatened the patriarchy’s privileged lifestyle at the expense of others? Although divorced, but as the mother of a future king, Diana would continue to have restrictions on what she could say and do, and the work she could take on—the Queen would still have been her boss. Nevertheless, I don’t think Diana, with her intense and steely mother-spirit, would have remained quiet amidst such hypocrisy and blatant cruelty in the world of Trumpery. 

Writer and teacher Martha Caldwell wrote about her experience in 2005 attending the first Global Women’s Leadership Conference sponsored by Zayed University, the women’s college in Dubai in the United Arab Emirates. She describes a glorious gathering of 750 women from forty different countries—diverse in their heritage, background, skills and challenges—most under the age of 25, all aware of the changing and expanding roles of women and all committed “to lead the larger world into a new vision.” To open the conference, Caldwell reported, a short film was shown “in tribute to important female leaders” featuring images of Indira Ghandi, Eleanor Roosevelt, Hillary Clinton, Mother Teresa, Margaret Thatcher and others. Then, “near the end of the film an image of Princess Diana appeared, a photo of her visiting a children’s hospital. Spontaneous applause erupted throughout the room—the only time during the film this happened.” 

For Caldwell, the moment was a surprise—and a mystery. “Why, after so many years, does Diana’s legacy continue to evoke such a passionate response?” The rich connections and shared experiences during this confluence of international women—mothers, executives, teachers, designers, entrepreneurs—clarified her inquiry when a “style of leadership that is particularly female began to emerge from the shared work of the conference.” Martha Caldwell described this vision and what she discovered because “this very feminine style of leadership” that Diana encouraged is such a brilliant model for women today:

A style of leadership…based on a vision of deep care and compassion, a love of the Earth and her people, a style of leadership that strives to express itself in the sustainable nurturance of the whole human family. As much as anyone else in recent history, Diana, with her open spirit, her great personal warmth and charitable gift to humanity exemplifies this very feminine style of leadership. It is because of her archetypal role that she continues to be the Princess of the people.

~~~

TO BE CONTINUED.....

{Against Feminine Nature} Book Excerpt

Excerpts from the "Against Feminine Nature" chapter of my book-in-progress, tentatively titled, A Memory of Love: The Spiritual Mission of a Princess. Enjoy....

Sarah Jennings Churchill, Duchess of Marlborough

“‘Remember, you’re a Spencer!’” biographers claimed Diana would say to herself to strengthen her resolve during stressful times. Spencers had been established in England for 500 years, amassing great wealth and political power through the centuries (and therefore much more “British” than her husband’s Windsor family). Sarah Jennings, born in 1660, wife of the 1^st Duke of Marlborough and grandmother of the first Diana Spencer, was “one of the most remarkable and difficult women of her day,” wrote biographer Sarah Bradford. “The Spencer tendency for falling out with members of the family—it is said Sarah changed her will fifty times—may well have been passed down from her.” Sarah Jennings’ pride, Bradford remarked, “led her to snub even her sovereign and former friend, Queen Anne.”

Over 250 years later, when another Diana Spencer was on the scene, Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother, told a friend that the Spencer women are “‘extremely unusual and difficult!’” According to Bradford, the Queen Mother’s friend, who happened to be a Spencer relation, agreed and also noted “‘an unforgiving side’” that seemed to run in the family; she was of the opinion that Princess Diana’s “‘inability to sustain friendships and relationships’” was also a family characteristic. She saw similar traits in her own Spencer mother with those of Diana, especially what she called Diana’s “‘manipulation of reality’” which took on a repetitious pattern of creating conflict, then calling for a dramatic reunion, only to stir things up once again. Whether it was an “inherited” family trait or not, this emotional roller coaster must have been exhausting for all involved.

~~~

From many accounts, the psychologically needy and acutely insecure Diana was full of unresolved anger from childhood; and as an adult, her volatile temper occasionally surfaced. Sometimes there was even a warning before the crash: “‘Stand by for a mood swing, boys,’” she’d say to her private secretary, explained biographer Tina Brown. Various conditions have been cited as possible reasons for Diana’s extremes: the frustrations of not being heard, much less not being allowed a voice; chemical imbalances brought on by her bulimia; misunderstood postpartum depression; living under the stress of so much suppressed emotion for so many years; perhaps some sort of personality disorder; even complications of her complex astrological chart. Or, as I read somewhere, “anger is nothing more than an outward expression of hurt, fear and frustration.” Whatever the causes, Diana could create a disconcerting battlefield-like, walking-on-eggshells environment for everyone around—including her “desperately unhappy” husband and his reserved family with their strict code-of-behavior.

~~~

Historically, many women had difficulty in expressing anger and if they did get angry, men found it difficult to deal with the volatility. Such emotional outbursts would not only have been discouraged, it could get the disruptive woman diagnosed with “hysteria” and locked up! No wonder a woman might express her anger silently by abusing her body and health, as Diana did. “How can she manifest her anger or her grief?” asked British writer Beatrix Campbell. “If the discovery of her own disappointment could not be revealed, because it could not be tolerated, then it made sense to keep screaming….” Or worse. 

Diana’s time in the spotlight, the 1980s and ‘90s, was a period of major change for women. What many considered the second wave of feminism was ending and the “grrls” of a post-modern generation were stirring a third wave—just as the long-anticipated “great shift in consciousness” was stirring the world. Looking back, Diana was a representative of eons of women’s rising collective anger. When the young princess began speaking up about feeling abandoned by mother, husband and monarchy, women were the first to lean in and really listen. What's more, when Diana spoke out, a whole kingdom of women revealed their discontent. “It was Diana’s treatment as a woman, and her sense that she was sustained by the sympathy and strength of women, that made her dangerous” to the patriarchal establishment, Campbell added. ~

[Sarah Jennings Churchill is the character in the 2018 awarding winning film "The Favourite" played by Rachel Weiss.] 
More book excerpts soon.....

{Why Royal Weddings Matter} No. 7: Royal Wedding Redux

Continuing the series for Confluence Daily, “Why Royal Weddings Matter,” we celebrate Prince Harry and Meghan Markle’s wedding with a look at a past bridal remembrance, reprinted here:

.........................................................................

Royal Wedding Redux

in British tradition, wedding vows are a morning affair, and if we were to catch the first glimpse of the beautiful bride, we needed to be “front and center” very early. My friends and I were a little old for a slumber party, but as we gathered in our pajamas at 4 a.m. in front of my clunky television in Atlanta, Georgia, the anticipation and giddiness was “ageless.”  It was July 29, 1981, and like millions of people around the world, we prepared to watch the royal wedding of Lady Diana Spencer and Charles, Prince of Wales. (We even had snacks to match the occasion: scones with homemade fig jam and Earl Grey tea with lemon—perhaps to not only feed our early morning hunger, but also some inherent dreams of being a princess.)

As the world welcomes a new “princess” today, we are reminded of another celebrated royal wedding almost four decades ago. It was a landmark event broadcast in 74 countries and watched around the world by over 750 million people—including me and my pajama-party friends!

The moment Diana stepped out of that fairy-tale-inspired glass coach on her wedding morning with endless yards of silk train magically materializing with her—"like seeing a butterfly emerge from its chrysalis,” her gown designers wrote later—she had us hook, line and sinker. Princess Diana did not invent our fascination with royalty, nevertheless, her wedding ushered in a whole new ballgame—and the world was never quite the same.

As the first worldwide media spectacular, and probably the defining event of the eighties—a decade in which style so often trumped substance—the glittering happening brought ceremonial weddings back in style almost overnight. It resurrected the bridal industry from the social upheavals of the previous two decades and set the pace for a new era of fancy wedding hoopla: elaborate designer gowns; staged over-the-top productions; refined Martha Stewart details; and the wedding as a “consumer rite.” (Sound familiar?)

Since the same media blitz followed Diana and Charles’ soap-opera marriage and thorny divorce, many people became wary of fairy tales and princesses. However, the endearing William and Kate, with their dignity and realness, made us fall in love all over again! And, of course, the royal buzz was on once more last fall when charming Prince Harry and lovely Meghan Markle announced their engagement. But there were and are differences.

Like her now sister-in-law Kate Middleton, Meghan is not “blue-blooded” (not even British, yet that will change after she marries the prince), but like what attracted William to Kate, Meghan has other qualities that were more important to Harry. Thanks in part to the princes’ mother cracking open the staid and out-of-touch British monarchy, revealing how “dynastic duty” has little to do with love and happiness, and, to insure they didn’t get boxed-in by the past, insisting her sons have the grounding of real-world experience. All of which helped to free William and Harry to choose to marry from their true heart’s desire. (Tweaking a quote from journalist extraordinaire Tina Brown, who has covered the weddings of Charles and Diana, William and Kate, and now Harry and Meghan: “Everything Diana had wished for her sons has come to pass. They each found the woman who would bring them the personal contentment she lacked.”)

So not only is the return to elegant wedding pageantry part of Diana’s legacy, but her most lasting legacy just may be Kate Middleton and Meghan Markle—and the more egalitarian world available to them as the two young women bring their confident, modern, compassionate and open-minded “princessdom” to a world ready for some genuine graciousness. Thank heavens for royal weddings! Tea, anyone? ~ 

[Excerpts from The End of the Fairy-Tale Bride: For Better or Worse, How Princess Diana Rescued the Great White Wedding … a book for anyone who likes their wedding pageantry tossed with a little fashion history and princess brides! Available on Amazon.]

{Why Royal Weddings Matter} No. 6: Wedding Vows

The wedding of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle is almost here! I'm happy to reprint the latest in my series, "Why Royal Weddings Matter," published on Confluence Daily. Enjoy remembrances of royal weddings past.... 

......................................

 Wedding Vows

The bride’s entrance into the majesty of St. Paul’s was announced by a fanfare from trumpeters high inside the cathedral’s celebrated dome. Perhaps they were not only announcing a princess bride, but prophetically heralding in, for better or worse, a new era. Thirty-seven years ago, Lady Diana Spencer’s charismatic appeal as a bride, combined with the grand splendor of the British monarchy, revived the “great white wedding”—helped along with society’s need for order and tradition, a little Reaganomics, plus a dash of glam and glitter!

Or as author Maria McBride-Mellinger described changes following the royal wedding in 1981: “After more than a decade of swinging singles and disco infernos, suddenly everyone wanted to be married and every bride wanted a gown fit for a queen: regal and ornate, with a lengthy train, and a jeweled veil. The big white wedding was back in style and no expense seemed too great.”

Signaling another change of the times (something more archetypal, affecting the archaic structure of relationships), the bride and groom made royal history that day with a break in tradition even before becoming husband and wife. Removing some outdated words from the Church of England’s 1662 version of the Book of Common Prayer, as the couple stood before the archbishop of Canterbury, and witnessed by nearly a million-fold television audience, the bride’s marriage vows did not include the promise “to obey.”

A London byline in The Washington Post a few days before the wedding reported that the archbishop of Canterbury revealed “the decision to drop this vow was made very quickly in his discussion of the service with Charles and Diana and that he told them, the usual clergyman’s joke. ‘It’s a bad thing to start your marriage off with a downright lie.’ He told reporters that many couples now omit the vow, which was a remnant from the Middle Ages, when a wife would pledge ‘to be bonny and buxom in bed and board.’”

I don’t doubt the archbishop’s knowledge of history regarding marriage vows including “to love, cherish and obey.” However, my understanding of the Latin meaning of the word “obey” as used in the old marriage text is “to hear, to deeply listen”—a promise that would be beneficial, even essential, to any successful marriage, yes? If that’s the case, my only complaint with the original marriage vows is that the pledge “to obey” (i.e., “to listen”) was in the woman’s declaration but not in the man’s. Is the promise “to love and cherish” truly possible without “deep listening”?

The gift of giving someone your focused attention, the gift of “deep listening,” is most precious. Perhaps because such a connection was so painfully missing in Charles and Diana’s relationship, they instilled in their sons a sixth sense about finding, cherishing and protecting love and harmony. We saw this intimacy of connection during the marriage vows of their first son Prince William and Kate Middleton—“their chemistry lit up the screen,” as Tina Brown wrote in Newsweek following their wedding. “Everything about her actions, to and for William, is about creating a feeling of safe continuity: You know me. I am here.”  We’ve seen this soulful closeness continue in their marriage and now in the relationship of second son Prince Harry and Meghan Markle, kindred spirits who found each other although from vastly different backgrounds.

I look forward to the upcoming royal wedding, the marriage ceremony of Harry and Meghan—not just for the “glam and glitter,” but especially to be present to the intimate recognition of the other, the deep listening of love in action, and the “set the world on fire” changes possible when wedding vows are made inside a spiritual partnership like both of these modern-day princes and their beloveds have created. All of life, then, becomes an awakening to “love and cherish.”

Certain wedding “traditions”—royal or otherwise—are indeed outdated and need tossing aside; others are keepers in their own right. Then there are those traditions that simply need the wisdom of a woman’s touch! ~

[In part, excerpted from The End of the Fairy-Tale Bride: For Better or Worse, How Princess Diana Rescued the Great White Wedding, available on Amazon.]