I have little use for the British royalty. I really don’t. I could care less who is in line for what role, and who is feuding with whom. It’s hard for me to believe that the British Parliament forks over more than 86 million pounds to keep the whole thing going. It’s anachronistic.
But I love the The Crown.
Call me a hypocrite and I guess I am, but I find the Netflix series fascinating. Great character development. It’s written well. Excellent acting all around. The music fits every scene. And I love the history.
The Crown encompasses six seasons, starting with Elizabeth’s ascension to the throne right through to her final days. Every two seasons the characters remain the same but different actors are employed to accommodate the fact that these people are actually aging.
By season 3, Queen Elizabeth’s husband Prince Philip is clearly in a mid-life crisis. He has no real role, no purpose other than to accompany the Queen to a multitude of boring functions. He’s in his late 40’s, watching other men his age ascend in whatever careers they have chosen, be it the military, finance, politics or otherwise. He’s in a funk.
In episode 4, Philip learns that his 82-year-old mother, Princess Alice, who lives in Greece, is in danger due to the military junta taking place in that country. He is told she needs to be evacuated, but to where? The last place he wants her is in Buckingham Palace. He is embarrassed by her. In his mind she’s become a chain-smoking eccentric who has also decided to become a nun who wears a habit. He regards her as an embarrassment, and over the years he has done everything possible to distance himself from her. Despite that, Queen Elizabeth overrules him and invites Alice to live at the palace. Philip is not happy at all with this turn of events and makes his sentiments well-known.
As the episode progresses (“Bubbikins” is the nickname she gave Philip when he was a child) we learn more about Alice. She was born congenitally deaf and therefore marginalized by her royal relatives. She was committed to multiple mental asylums, diagnosed with schizophrenia and subjected to all kinds of archaic, harmful and ineffective treatments.
We learn that from the depths of despair, Alice turned to her faith. She founded a religious order of Greek Orthodox nuns who were devoted to nursing care for the destitute poor in that country. (Not revealed in this episode is that she also hid a Jewish family in German-occupied Greece during World War Two. She would posthumously receive the title of Righteous Among the Nations from Israel.)
Her son knew none of this but learns about it when Alice gives an interview to the British newspaper The Guardian. He then becomes ashamed at how he has treated his mother. Near the end of the episode the two of them have the first real interaction and conversation perhaps in their entire adult life. She can see the depression he is in, and asks:
“How’s your faith?”
“Dormant,” he replies.
She thinks for a moment and says, “Let this be a mother’s gift to her child. The one piece of advice. Find yourself a faith. It helps. No. Not just helps. It’s everything.”
Watching this on my living room television, I literally hit the pause button, rewound it, played it again, rewound it, played it again with a pad and pen in hand, this time to make sure I had every single word down.
“Find yourself a faith. It helps. No. Not just helps. It’s everything……………….”
That’s right. Faith is everything. It’s not just something that helps us when we lose a job, or when we or someone we love becomes ill, or when our marriage is falling apart. Faith does help us through those terrible moments, but it is far more than that, and Princess Alice knew it. It’s everything. It’s the way we “live and move and have our being.” (Acts 17:28) It’s what makes life rich, what makes life truly worth living.
This is the message Alice delivered to her son. It is the message we too who believe in God are called to deliver. It is a message most desperately needed in these times of national and world cynicism, difficulty, and tragedy.
Faith does not just help. It’s everything.
Mark Redmond is the author of Called: A Memoir.
Image: Prince Philip of Britain with his mother beside him, April 18, 1966 at The Hague, South Holland. By Fotograaf Onbekend / Anefo – http://proxy.handle.net/10648/aae5fdd2-d0b4-102d-bcf8-003048976d84, CC0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=65956201
Mark Redmond has worked in the field of caring for homeless and at-risk youth for over 42 years, starting as a member of the Covenant House faith community in 1981. He is presently executive director of Spectrum Youth & Family Services in Burlington, Vermont.
He has published columns in Forbes, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Huffington Post, Commonweal, The National Catholic Reporter and America. He is also a storyteller. His story “This Church” was onThe Moth Radio Hourand podcast, and he has had stories on other podcasts such as The Lapse, Family Secrets, The Goodness Exchange, Outside the Walls and Risk! A story he told for WGBH’s Stories from the Stage played on most public television stations around the United States, and his one-person show on Broadway,So Shines a Good Deed,premiered in October 2019. Six days later his one-person showThe Moustache Diariespremiered at The Flynn Space in Burlington. He has performed on stage in Boston, Brooklyn, Montreal and Burlington.
His first book,The Goodness Within: Reaching out to Troubled Teens with Love and Compassion(Paulist Press) was published in 2003 and his latest book,Called: A Memoir(Onion River Press) came out in May 2021.
Mark graduated from Villanova University in 1979 and from New York University with a masters in 1986.
Mark lives in Essex, Vermont with his wife Marybeth and son Liam who is a junior at the University of Notre Dame.
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