With Canon Ann Easter, Chief Executive of a Charity and Chaplain to the Queen.

Today is the 76th anniversary of the accession to the throne of Edward 8th, our Queen’s uncle and the King who was never crowned because, after just a few months, Edward gave up his inherited right and abdicated the throne because he was not allowed to reign as King and to marry the woman he loved, Wallis Simpson, who was a twice-divorced American.
I remember my dad, who was just a boy at the time, telling me how he heard his older sisters talking endlessly about this shocking news, veering wildly between being entranced by the romance of it and being horrified by the intimate revelations about the Royal Family of whose personal lives they had previously known very little. Over the years, a number of books and television programmes have been made about the relationship between Edward and Wallis and now the singer Madonna has directed a film about it too.
As the song says – ‘The things we do for love’ eh?
Mind you, it’s one thing when the one to whom we sacrifice our all is stylish or witty or clever, quite another when they’re bald, wrinkled, toothless and incontinent – babies, I’m talking about, obviously, and then we gladly give up our sleep, our money and our whole lives to them for maybe twenty or even thirty years of unpredictable stuff we can’t possibly imagine when it begins! And, naturally, we’ll complain loudly – but do it any other way? Of course not!
And whether it’s our own little prince or princess, potholing or politics, without love and passion, without someone or something to give up stupid things for, life wouldn’t be worth a candle would it? Of course it’s painful and messy sometimes but to love and be loved is what we humans are created for and it’s what helps to make us the people God wants us to be. And every time we risk our heart again, we learn a bit more about God and about ourselves.