The soul searchers

Who can doubt that something happened to the spiritual life of the country after the death of Diana? Many at the time looked forward to a religious revival. But the truth of what was felt then, and what it means a year later is more complex. By Paul Vallely

They always leave the Cellophane on. And that is something revealing in itself. All across the country these days we see inadequate little bunches of flowers fastened to lampposts and fences by the side of dangerous roads. They tell stories of a grief that cuts too deep for words. But they also attempt to draw us, for a fleeting moment, to share the sorrow. They attempt to personalise a public space, and to make it holy. But it is a pain that is too raw to expose completely before strangers. They leave on the Cellophane.

The practice of leaving flowers by the roadside has been growing slowly for more than a decade but it has accelerated rapidly since the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, just a year ago. The anthropologists call it "folk behaviour". It is characteristically spontaneous, uncritical and personal. It is extremely eclectic. It picks up elements from popular culture, superstition, sentiment, the paranormal, and it appropriates religious beliefs and practices and secularises them. Or does it?

There were many in the churches who said at the time of Diana's death that the phenomenal public response represented the stirring of a dormant religious feeling among people who have lost the old religious vocabulary, but whose instincts remained. Some still feel that. Only a couple of months ago the Archbishop of Canterbury, George Carey, told a conference:

"As I walked among the crowds on the night before her funeral, I found that people were asking profound questions about the meaning of life and death. The flowers and candles spoke, too, of shock and grief mixed with a sense that death is not the end and that there is something beyond this life... Of course, flowers, messages and the spontaneous outpouring of grief do not by themselves indicate an implicit spirituality. But it was noticeable how many makeshift shrines appeared. And as well as the flowers piling up outside Buckingham Palace and St James's Palace, they were taken in vast quantities to our cathedrals and parish churches.

"Hundreds of churches had special services for Diana; thousands of people came to light candles in her memory. York Minster sold 15,000 candles that week."

There were those who smelled opportunity. "It was a defining moment," says Paul Handley, the editor of Church Times. "It revealed to the established church that the British public, if not religious, were keen to express themselves religiously - and that did cause a certain amount of excitement among the mission-minded." Indeed, a group of the Church's key thinkers are to gather for a private seminar on the subject at St George's Windsor next month.

Certainly the public response to the Princess's death was heavy with meaning. The mourning was not personal; it was collective. The milling crowds with their flowers allowed individuals to become part of something greater than themselves; they became a sort of congregation, gathered in solemn purpose. In long waits to sign the books of remembrance, that most British of institutions - the queue - was sacralised.

The need to subsume individual identity in a common expression during a time of social fragmentation may be a phenomenon for our time. Whether it speaks of true spirituality is another matter. Most people who rushed to interpret seemed to get it wrong, in the view of Jonathan Dollimore, the author of Death, Desire and Loss in Western Culture, who is a professor at Sussex University's Humanities Research Centre.

"There was a mass hysteria, but there was genuine emotion swept along with it," he says. He was struck by the intimacy of many of the messages accompanying the flowers laid in his local town. "It was people distilling the accumulated wisdom of their years and offering it to her as they might to their own child. I respect it, but don't trust it".

Death often marks the spot where cultures affirm themselves. There are interesting parallels elsewhere. It was after the Hillsborough disaster in 1989 that the phenomenon became apparent on a large scale: a million people laid flowers and football memorabilia in memory of the fans who were crushed to death in the Sheffield football stadium. Similar responses occurred in Norway on the death of King Olaf V in 1991; in Sweden after the Estonia ferry disaster in 1994; and during the White March in Belgium in 1996, protesting against apparent official indifference to the murder of children by paedophiles.

"All these provoked similar phenomena," says Douglas Davies, professor of theology at Durham University, who has made a special study of the rituals surrounding death. "They all involve extremely large numbers of people acting in an unexpected and unrehearsed fashion in reaction to a death which touches the depth of human sentiment and social morality."

Davies is dismissive of those church commentators who have tried to interpret the Diana happenings in terms of some old and deep-seated religiosity connected with Marian worship or even pagan activities.

"The view that ritual is like a kind of language, full of meaning and open to decoding, can mislead. The significance of these acts lies within the act itself. It is the doing of it and not any extensive exegesis which counts."

None the less, he believes that they are rooted in a religious impulse. The acts and flowers he describes as "words against death" that human response to death, which asserts that it does not overcome and destroy those relationships and hopes which lie at the heart of human identity. The eventual composting of the flowers was in itself a powerful eucharistic symbol - of life out of death.

But isn't such religion in the eye of the committed beholder? Yes and No, says John Bowker, the author of The Meanings of Death. He refers me to the entry on "Biogenetic Structuralism and Religion" in his recent Oxford Dictionary of World Religions. What it says, essentially, is that the human brain is hard-wired to be religious. The gene-protein process in the formation of the human body prepares human beings for characteristic behaviours. It prepares us for linguistic, sexual, religious, musical and other competences, without dictating what we do with each competence. The human brain looks for something to be religious about.

So why did these impulses attach to Diana? "What other vehicles are their in modern life for these deep chemical emotions?" asks Bowker sardonically. In Nineties Britain the polarities of the religious experience - good and evil, adulation and excoriation - extend no further than Owen and Beckham and the metaphor that is World Cup football.

Professor Davies is more helpful. Diana was loaded with symbolic meaning. She was what Davies calls "an imaginary friend" - a figure who helps generate a sense of self and place in the world for ordinary folk. Her narrative was theirs - love, marriage, children, caring, disrupted relationships and divorce. Her daily realities were theirs - clothes, make-up, hairdos, diet, exercise, slimming, even the vulnerability of eating disorders and the insecurity of low self-esteem. Yet she lived also in the fantasy world of pop singers, film stars royalty and other celebrities. Diana bridged the gap between the quotidian world and the world of romance.

"Tragedy reflects upon human self-worth," he says. "Those who are the bearers of a more powerful sense of worth are most extensively ritualised in their death. Those who carry the heaviest symbolic significance for our own lives are those whose deaths are most heavily invested with meaning."

And this meaning is moral. Which was why it was so important from the outset to apportion blame: to the paparazzi or to an allegedly drunken driver, or even to the Royal Family for appearing unsympathetic. "It may have been unbalanced and naive but, still, it exposed a moral sense."

Royal ceremonial, the historian David Cannadine once argued, takes its significance from reflecting the Zeitgeist of the times. Diana died against the background of a recent landslide by New Labour, with all its talk of The People, the Voice of the People, the People's this and the People's that. The "People's Princess" was an inevitability, as was the people's peremptory, primordial demand that the Queen come down from on high to walk among them. It was part of what Bowker calls "an Up Yours" which is an emotion that his Biogenetic Structuralists have located in one of the most primitive parts of the brain, the limbic lobe. "Diana's two fingers to the establishment appealed directly to this part of the brain," he says.

Whatever, that appeal was deep. Last month James Roose-Evans, the theatre director and Anglican priest, held a conference for people in professions that still have to deal with those who continue to grieve for the Princess. "Like Sleeping Beauty, she lies in a casket on an island in a circular lake," said Roose-Evans extravagantly. "She is the only modern myth." Participants had to express their feelings by making montages of newspaper and magazine photographs of Diana, choosing images which best summed up the Princess for them. One therapist made a presentation of Diana as "a Christ-like figure who appeals subliminally. She bore our own sins, our weaknesses and sufferings".

All of which, you might think, would receive short shrift from a prominent Roman Catholic writer such as Margaret Hebblethwaite. Not so. She is talking about Diana becoming a saint. "At first when people asked if she was a saint, I laughed," she says. "But there has been a change over the year. A cult has grown up, of people responding to the goodness in her. And there is a Christian tradition of women who were royal, beautiful and loved the poor, becoming saints - Margaret of Scotland, Elizabeth of Hungary, Isabella of Spain."

Point to Diana's well scrutinised short-comings and she replies: "Obviously she had flaws, but the mood is that she can be flawed." Historically, saints have not always been perfectly holy characters; all that is required for sainthood is that, in their life, they have "displayed heroic virtue". A cult is the first signal of possible canonisation. "I wouldn't call her a saint but I don't think that those who do are stupid. There is over her the shadow of the archetype of the Suffering Servant - a term applied to the prophet Isaiah and then Christ - the one who saves people through self-sacrifice. By her death she has won the battle on landmines. You can't say there is nothing in this."

There are religious thinkers with serious reservations about this. Diana's death was a media event. Not merely in the sense that the media were implicated, then reported it, and finally manipulated it in the way they criticised the Royal Family for not sharing their heart-on-the-sleeve, Oprah Winfrey notion of grief - but rather in the sense that Diana was a media figure. Most people's knowledge of her was mediated through the TV and newspapers. They did not know her, and yet they knew more about her than they did about many in real life.

"When stars really die, when real life intersects with fiction, a kind of phenomenological dissonance occurs," says Professor Davies. "Diana was not supposed to die, because she was not really real." Annabel Miller, assistant editor of The Tablet, a Catholic weekly, agrees: "People weren't mourning a real woman. There was none of the messiness of a close death to sort out. No recriminations, no `why didn't I visit more often?', no, `did he really like me?', no `I should have made my peace'."

"In the end," says Rowan Williams, the former Cambridge professor of divinity who is now Bishop of Monmouth, "although the rituals that people invented have their own vitality, it seemed more about a discharge of emotions than anything that could really be described as spiritual."

Edward Kessler is not so sure. He speaks from a religious point of view, but not a Christian one. "Jews always have a belief in the latent religiosity of people. From a Jewish point of view, a relationship is a very religious thing," says Kessler, who is the director of the Centre for Jewish-Christian Relations at Cambridge University.

"Diana is still beautiful, tragic, and for ever young - and our first icon in that category. Will Althorp become a tourist theme park or something deeper? I think it will be 10 or 15 years before we know."

Tomorrow: The investigation