19 May 2018: Wedding day of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle
‘He did it black,’ reported the Guardian, ‘with music in his arms and rhythm in his voice.’
The bishop had been asked to preach for six minutes. But inspired by the occasion, and departing from the prepared text on the iPad that he was waving in front of him, Curry went on for fourteen.
‘What a fucking time to try out that much new material!’ responded one user on Twitter. ‘[I’m] reeling from that preacher’s performance.’
So was the entire congregation. Bewilderment, giggling, mouths agape, stifled laughter – the full range of upper-class British embarrassment was laid bare by this exposure to exuberant revivalist African-American culture. Camilla’s shoulders were heaving – one understood why aristocratic ladies wore wide-brimmed hats to keep their facial expressions concealed.
Sitting beside Camilla, Kate Middleton gave her stepmother-in-law a sharp ‘side-eye’ in reproof. The newspapers and website commentators all caught it.
‘We typically don’t see such serious and stern behaviour from Kate,’ reported Susan Constantine, the human behavioural expert, in Good Housekeeping magazine. ‘This gesture – smirked eyes and a turned-down mouth – was a rather dignified way to reprimand Camilla.’
Prince Andrew’s younger daughter Eugenie, due to be married that October, was wide-eyed with delight – ‘Will she be booking Curry for her wedding?’ asked one Internet observer.
But most comment was reserved for the unconcealed jaw-drop of Princess Anne’s daughter Zara Tindall, captured by all the cameras and looking almost as if she was in pain. Later Tindall explained her uncomfortable expression in terms of the baby she was carrying in her eighth month of pregnancy. ‘My bum sort of slid over either side,’ she said to the Telegraph, ‘and Lena kicked the hell out of me for an hour.’
Could any or all of these reactions to Bishop Curry’s startling performance be described as ‘racist’? The commentators – and they were numerous online – were divided. Many felt that every smirk and side-eye in the well-heeled congregation betrayed snotty white racial prejudice. But others argued that they would laugh and roll their eyes at any histrionic white sermoniser who preached over length – and this duality would characterise future criticisms of Meghan as the public’s ‘honeymoon’ with her wore off in the months following her marriage.
In politically correct America, NBC’s satirical Saturday Night Live ran a skit that parodied the bishop – without receiving any public complaint: ‘I preached and I testified and I yelled,’ declared actor Kenan Thompson playing the preacher with a remarkably similar set of sparkling dental work, ‘while five hundred stuffy English people looked at me like I was a fart in an elevator.’
The great irony of Bishop Curry’s rambling and extemporaneous style, of course, was that it had been developed in the slave settlements that Britain had established in America from the seventeenth century onwards. Here at Windsor, in the heart of the institution embodying Britain’s imperial grandeur, financed historically by the revenues of the slave trade, was the descendant of a slave radiating the same defiant joy that slaves had first experienced in their churches every Sunday. This was their sole moment of ‘revival’ from a week of grinding labour when they could ‘Steal away to Jesus’. Prayers, sermons and rollicking song – these were all the weapons that they had developed to reach out for some kind of hope and freedom.
Now the Reverend was talking about Martin Luther King and the practical hope of freedom that he had embodied. Queen Elizabeth II certainly ‘got’ this, for her own favourite form of preaching was the revivalist kind of Dr Billy Graham – white, but a good friend and supporter of Dr King, and the closest thing you could get to black preaching in a white church. The Queen would often invite Dr Graham to preach to her when he came to London – though in the early days those sermons were in private.
Later, in 2001, the Queen knighted Graham – quite a rare American knighthood – to make clear how committed she was personally to his evangelical message. And for Meghan sitting a few seats away, Bishop Curry’s religious affirmation must have brought back memories of her teenage summer camps at which she had encountered and signed up for her own deity – ‘Agape’, the unconditional love of God for the world.
The entire cross-cultural experience of Bishop Michael Curry’s sermon that May morning in 2018 in Windsor was a moving phenomenon – ‘Raw God’ was the approving verdict of Justin Welby, the Archbishop of Canterbury. Curry’s words were loving in their purpose and content but they proved deeply complex in the contrasting range of reactions that they evoked. Harry and Meghan were fully on board for the love. But did they understand and have the capacity to cope with that massive and treacherous complexity?
22
In Vogue
‘Hello, I am the beach …
I literally don’t give a fuck.’
(Matt Haig, Notes on a Nervous Planet, 2018)
Asked for a sample of poetry that she admired, Meghan Markle came up with these striking lines by the bestselling Sheffield author Matt Haig, their theme being the folly of body-consciousness and the beauty culture – the deadly sin of human vanity as viewed by one ancient stretch of seaside sand:
I am entirely indifferent to your body mass index.
I am not impressed that your abdominal muscles are visible to the naked eye.
I am oblivious.
You are one of 200,000 generations of human beings.
I have seen them all …
Why do you humans worry so much about a stranger’s opinion?
It was a curious message to publish in British Vogue, the UK’s bible of how to look good in the eyes of strangers, but that was the spiky nature of many of the contents that Meghan Markle – now Duchess of Sussex and about-to-be mother of Archie – contributed to Vogue’s upcoming September 2019 issue, the magazine’s biggest and most significant edition of the year.
‘Forces
