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Photo: 'Peace' by Faith Bellamy
News from Yetminster Methodist Church As I write this, plans are being made public for the celebration of The Queen’s Platinum Jubilee celebrations. As you receive this at the beginning of June, those festivities will be well under way. For 70 years Her Majesty has served her people, both in this country and throughout the Commonwealth, faithfully keeping the promises she made at her Coronation on 2 June 1953. Humanly speaking she was not ‘born to be Queen’, for it was only due to the abdication of her uncle Edward VIII that her father became King and, in turn, she became the heir to the throne when she was just nine years old. Naturally, she might have expected to become Queen when middle aged, but, with the early death of her father, as a young wife with two small children, she took on the formal title:
‘Elizabeth the Second, by Grace of God, of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and of her other Realms and Territories Queen, Head of the Commonwealth, Defender of the Faith.’ In preparation for her Coronation, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Geoffrey Fisher, gave the Queen a little book of Private Devotions, daily meditations with Bible readings and prayers, based on the symbolism of the Coronation ceremony, rooted in the Bible. This she followed for 33 days prior to Coronation. Of her journey to Westminster, she would have prayed, ‘The whole of life is a journey to God ... I have not chosen this office for myself; He has appointed me to it and I go to be consecrated to it by Him … because He leads, I may follow in complete trust’. At the end of the Coronation Day, the Book of Devotions invited the Queen 53
