From Ademar at the Glittering Royals MB:
Church Blessing of TRH Prince and Princess Johan Friso of Oranje-Nassau
Imagine a pavement café on a large square in Amsterdam. A woman sits reading the morning paper, sipping a cup of coffee. She turns to a friend and says, ‘Where is this all heading…?’
Sitting behind these two friends we see Professor Van der Leeuw, a theologian and one of our first prime ministers after the war. He cannot resist answering the question with another question. ‘Excuse me, but who told you that it should be heading anywhere?’
There is a well-known Dutch hymn that goes ‘Whither leads the path that we must follow?’ Where did we get the idea that the world should be heading somewhere? That we should be following a path in our lives? Clearly, it is something we sense deep within ourselves. And it seems that the whole meaning of our existence rests on the answer we give to this question.
Prior to our discussions to prepare for this special day, Friso and Mabel committed to paper their thoughts on their future together. They let me draw on these letters today. Friso described life as a journey, as a flight. Not surprising for someone who has studied aeronautical engineering and holds a pilot’s licence.
‘In times of peace and predictability,’ writes Friso, ‘you move forward in full flight. You think you know where you are heading. Sometimes you encounter some turbulence, but you don’t usually need to give what you are doing much thought. Things are going well. You are above the clouds, everything looks fine, clear and sunny.
Now and again you have to make a landing, sometimes scheduled, sometimes not. Landings can represent major turning points in life. Such as a change of career or course of study, accidents or setbacks, or the death of a loved one. These are also the moments when you can think about your next destination and about the passengers or copilot you want to come with you.’
Those who know her – and here, Friso, I would like to put your letter aside for a moment – are aware that you have found a lovely and able copilot. As you got to know each other, you gradually became aware – after a few ups and downs, as is to be expected when two people with differing temperaments and backgrounds fall in love – how close you were becoming. There was a kind of electricity between you, or ‘flames’, to use the words of the Song of Songs, that jewel in the bible. Flames ‘of the Lord’, the poet ventures to say, because he is unable to explain otherwise how two people fall in love and cannot contemplate the idea of being without each other. Flames of the Lord, he says, and – as we will soon hear from the choir – ‘many waters cannot quench love, neither can the floods drown it’.
And indeed, many turbulent waters have coursed over your love. Some people found it difficult to understand you in the events that gave rise to this turbulence. Yet others say that they did understand. But if there is one thing that has been made plain to us all, it is the strength of your love. It proved capable of withstanding what befell you and, if anything, it has become even stronger.
It is apparent to all of us that people have not always done you justice. And maybe it wasn’t easy to know you properly, with both of you living abroad. People tend to resort to conjecture, and their guesswork is often wide of the mark. It was therefore good that you had the courage to offer us greater insight into your lives and your expectations of life by taking part in a television interview. It was also clear to us, Mabel, how warmly and fully your husband’s family had taken you into their midst.
Let me now return to Friso’s letter. You both wanted to get married in church, so I asked you how you saw God. ‘God,’ you said, ‘fulfils the same role in my life as the navigation equipment in an aeroplane. As a pilot, you don’t know exactly how it works, but then you don’t need to, as long as you know what you can do with it. Using this equipment, you can fly further, with greater certainty and fewer worries than would otherwise be possible. Its most important quality is that you can always rely on it; you know that it points you in the right direction. If your attention lapses and you stray momentarily from the right path, you know that He is there for you’ – you write ‘He’ here with a capital ‘H’ – ‘that He is there to set you back on course. He does this without making a judgment on how or why you have strayed. If you are lost in cloud or mist, if you no longer know where you are or what you should do, you can always count on His help to get you out of difficulty. If you have to make a landing, He makes sure you can find the airfield and touch down safely. And, as you continue your journey, He shows you the way to go. Marriage’ – you go on to say – ‘is just such a landing for me. Mabel and I have had an interesting, turbulent, but pleasant flight. I am sure that we will arrive safely, and will take off again safely too. This is why I think it is important that we get married in church and ask for God’s blessing on our future journeys together.’
There are moments in our life when our wings seem to be broken, when we seem to be numbed. I have in mind what both Friso and Mabel have been through in their lives in terms of illness and worries. Not only do we sorely miss Friso’s father today; Mabel too has lost a father, on two occasions, her second father having meant no less to her than her first. But at the same time, said Mabel, my faith in God is so deep that it always overcomes every setback and disappointment.
Your mother, Mabel, recalled how, at nursery school, you lapped up the Bible stories. And that from the age of about ten you knew you wanted to become a missionary. You have in fact become one, although your concern now is not to tell people in other countries about the Bible, but, together with others, to provide advice and financial support for people in eastern Europe who are making the transition from dictatorship to an open and responsible society. And to work in this way to achieve more justice and humanity in this world. Because, as you put it, that is what faith in God demands of us and also stands for.
I enjoyed reading in the newspaper about your appearance together with other former pupils at the anniversary celebrations of your old school in Hilversum. Your enthusiasm in talking about your work was so infectious that one pupil decided there and then to do a degree in political science instead of medicine, so that later she might be able to work for a human rights organisation. So you see, Mabel, you have become a kind missionary.
It seems to me that you have always been in a bit of a hurry. That is to say, time has always been precious. As a student in Amsterdam, if you had to wait quarter of an hour for the tram, you would unfailingly do so with a course book on your knee. Perhaps this trait was reinforced by the loss of your father when you were nine. ‘It made me realise,’ you said, ‘that life is not endless. Life,’ you went on, ‘is a wonderful, unique gift, its only insurmountable limitation is time. It is not only a shame but also shameful to do nothing with your life.’ You both experience life as a unique gift and – I hesitate to say this – as a calling.
Which brings me back to the story we have just read, in which Moses is called by God to lead his people, the Israelites, out of slavery in Egypt. ‘I have surely seen,’ said God, ‘the affliction of my people which are in Egypt, and have heard their cry by reason of their taskmasters. And I am come down to deliver them out of the hand of the Egyptians, and to bring them up out of that land unto a good land and a large.’ But Moses was unsure whether he could trust this voice, and answered, ‘Behold, when I come unto the children of Israel, and shall say unto them, The God of your fathers hath sent me unto you; and they shall say to me, What is his name? What shall I say unto them?’ And God said: I WILL BE THERE. Tell the children of Israel that I WILL BE THERE has sent you.
It was of unprecedented significance for the whole of human history that the people of Israel were the first people to give the name ‘I WILL BE THERE’ to that mystery we refer to by the word ‘God’. By this they meant: we can have faith in this world and this life. There is a sustaining force – Israel saw this sustaining force, entirely in the spirit of the time, as a person, an image that people cannot really do without and which I think we should hold onto – there is a sustaining force, which we do not invoke in vain, and which manifests itself repeatedly in human history. A force that is not the sole privilege of the ancient people of Israel, but of all people. A force to which all the injustice in the world, all tyranny must yield again and again; a driving force that ultimately brings people together and reconciles them, as surely as its name is I WILL BE THERE. A force, a God who does not remain idle as people are humiliated and crushed, a God who calls people towards a world of justice and peace, the world he envisaged when he began. A God who continually mobilises people to speak for him and do his work on earth. There operates on high, in Friso’s words, a celestial navigation system, which we would do well to use, at least if we wish to get anywhere with this world.
I WILL BE THERE. This is four letters in the Hebrew. They are depicted high in a window of this church, a window dedicated to Prince William of Orange, who was born in Dillenburg in 1533. On 24 April, this very day. The man who led the resistance against Spanish domination in these parts and who ultimately only found the courage to fight the Spaniards because God was his ‘shield and his trust’.
But if these four words form the essence of God, this has major consequences for us. Because if we believe in a God who says I WILL BE THERE, we can hardly fail to respond and not ‘be there’ ourselves when it really matters and someone calls on our help. We have to be there. After all, what can God do without people, without us? The Bible teaches us that not only do we need God to know where we should go in life, but that God also needs us. After all, as the Old Testament says, man was made in the image and after the likeness of God. That is his calling. And if this origin can no longer be seen in him, his life is a sorry affair.
If you want to know, says the Good Book, who God is, then look at those people in history who have embodied him like no other. Look at Moses, and the prophet Isaiah. And Jesus of Nazareth who, it seems, understood and mirrored God like no other. His words, said the people, were the words of God. God spoke through this man. In this man, God came down to earth to set an example, as it were, for mankind. Yet, he came back with holes bored through his hands.
And what is happening today in this church is this: two people are becoming joined together with this God, as we have come to know him most profoundly in the man from Nazareth, so that their lives, like his, shall be meaningful. Seeking that love to which God holds the secret.
Paul tried to describe God’s love, as we have just heard in that sublime passage. Love, he says, and you could also say true love, ‘suffereth long, and is kind; […] believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things’.
Needless to say, Paul is describing here not what he sees every day, but what he does not see every day. He describes the love to which God holds the secret. He is actually describing God himself. He cannot do so in a single word, and sometimes he is better able to express what love is not, rather than what it is. Love ‘seeketh not her own, is not easily provoked, thinketh no evil’.
It is in this spirit that these two people, whom today we support with our friendship and love, will strive to live their lives together. They will endeavour to be as God to each other. To be there – in his spirit – for each other.
And now Mabel can set off with Friso on their shared future; now she can find the courage to do so, because Friso will tell her, echoing God’s words to Moses when he asked his name, ‘Trust me Mabel, I will be there’.
And Mabel will say the same to Friso, in his commitment to her and in all they will encounter in their lives together, ‘Trust me Friso, I will be there’.