Hundreds gathered at Bury St Edmund Cathedral on Saturday for a service honouring the life of the late Queen.
The Dean of St Edmundsbury Cathedral, Joe Hawes, said the people of Suffolk were coming together in “immense sadness and huge gratitude.”
He said: “In her living and in her dying, [Queen Elizabeth] showed us the meaning of vocation, a vocation she never sought but willingly embraced, unflinchingly lived and graciously laid down.”
Suffolk had, he said, always held a special place in the late Queen’s heart.
He said: “We commit ourselves in this place that she visited, in this county for which she had great affection, to live well for our fellow sisters and brothers in Suffolk.”
The sermon was given by the Bishop of St Edmundsbury Cathedral, the Right Reverend Martin Seeley, who said that the days since the death of Queen Elizabeth have been a “time out of time.”
“In those first few hours, those first couple of days, we seemed stuck into almost unbelieving silence,” he said.
“We had seen her, smiling, just two days before, greeting her new Prime Minister.
“But then, what we all had hoped would never happen happened.”
The Reverend Seeley counted himself lucky to have several personal memories of the Queen, who, he said, “simply wanted to know all her bishops.”
Of these, he said he looked back fondly upon: “The conversation after paying to homage, when we compared the roads in Suffolk with those in Norfolk.
“And, when she asked so kindly about how my own children were adjusting to the move.
“Or, sitting next to her on the sofa at Sandringham, watching the news on the television, just the three us: her majesty, Prince Philip, and, I pinch myself, me.”
The Queen had, he said, touched the lives of so many.
“She has bequeathed to us a sense of ourselves, as a people and a nation, and as individuals, families and communities,” he said.
“I believe it was her selfless dedication to her vocation that has so touched the deepest longings and hopes of our hearts.
“That dedication sprang from her own deep understanding, that it was God who had called her and upon whom she could depend.
“That never wavered. And so, our experience of her as our Queen never wavered.”
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