Sixty nine years after Her Late Majesty came to Westminster Abbey to be anointed, crowned and enthroned her mortal remains were taken to the Abbey for her funeral service. Her recent physical death, however, is of little importance compared to the death that she underwent at her coronation in 1953. For the death she underwent then was a metaphysical death, a great death upon the Altar of God.
The future Russian Orthodox Metropolitan Anthony of Sourozh was in the congregation at the Abbey that day, and later recounted how the Queen had entered the Abbey, escorted by two bishops, as she went “forth consciously to the Altar of the Living God, to be a living sacrifice, like the daughter of Jephthah – to die to herself, in order to live with and for her people…the young Queen did not prepare her heart for a feast, but for a consecration.”
