Everyone here will have their own memories. I remember meeting Princess Diana for the first time early in 1981 to discuss details of the wedding service in St. Paul's. Even Archbishop's Chaplains have their share of proper diffidence and I was nervous entering the presence. It must have been a bewildering time for the Princess as well but even then at the age of 20 her capacity for empathy and her very strong intuitive power ensured that any tension soon evaporated.

Prince Harry has spoken movingly and justly as few others have a right to do about the Princess as a mother. I want to dwell for a moment on her public work, its cost and meaning.

After her marriage, the Princess joined her natural gifts of beauty, empathy, and powerful intuition, with the extra-ordinary charge which association with the Royal Family generates.

Led by our present Queen and other members of the Royal Family, our constitution has developed in response to the challenges of the past century. There is properly a political sphere in which the monarch may counsel but does not intrude but there is another sphere, vital to any sense of national unity and creativity, in which continuities must be celebrated, common values articulated and the transcendent source of those values honoured.

We tend to suspicious of political figures who wrap themselves in divinity and claim that their will is God's will but if no one can articulate in an un-ignorable way in the public realm the creative energy of the love that we see in Christ, the human face of God, then we shall find ourselves inhabiting a maimed and diminished society.

At a time when people are suspicious of rhetoric, the monarchy communicates by symbol and simple speech and the Princess brought her own gifts to this work. She was still only 26 in 1987 when she shook the hand of a patient at the opening of the Middlesex Hospital's AIDS ward, the first in the UK.

It is hard now to credit the degree of fear and prejudice which surrounded AIDS in the eighties. Those familiar with the field have no doubt that the Princess played a significant part in overcoming a harmful and even cruel taboo in a gesture which was not choreographed but sprang from a deep identification with those who were vulnerable and on the margin. She had a similar impact in the USA and an editorial in the New York Times in 1989 admitted ruefully that it had taken a foreign and even royal dignitary to draw attention to a major public health concern in the U.S.

Her work in the very last year of her life for the victims of landmines also caught the popular imagination internationally and certainly accelerated the adoption of the Ottawa Convention, banning the use of a weapon which disproportionately kills and maims women and children.

She proved the eloquence of embrace and touch which of course have been used by royal healers through the centuries. And as she said "the biggest disease today is not leprosy or TB but the feeling of being unwanted". She sought out places of suffering which are so very often places of truth where the masks have been removed and she was not afraid to be with the dying and to comfort them in an unsentimental way.

Bill Deedes accompanied her on some of her visits. His response to the cynics was typically robust. She was "one who sought above all to help vulnerable people in society and who did it so well. She was good at this because she herself was vulnerable. She knew the feeling. She did not set out to be a saint."

The role brought great power but like any member of the Royal Family she experienced the weight of expectation and the intensity of the scrutiny. Honouring but managing the role and not allowing it to take over one's personal humanity is a desperately difficult task. As we have heard from Prince Harry, his mother Diana did all that she could to prepare her sons for the work which lies ahead.

She confessed to receiving a very great deal from some of those whose lives she touched. She said of John, a young Greek suffering from cystic fibrosis - "He showed no sign of anger, no trace of bitterness but touched us all with an aura of optimism and hope for the future such that I have never before encountered."

The love of Christ described in the lesson read by Prince William contains the essence of the spiritual life. Princess Diana recognised this quality of life in many of those, like John, whose lives she touched. It was a mystery which resonated deeply with her and for which she reached out.

The mystery is this, the more you go beyond yourself, the more you will become your true self. The more you lose yourself in loving and serving others, the more you will find yourself. The more you keep company with those who suffer the more you will be healed. This is the knowledge which passes all understanding. This is certain and has been proved experimentally in the life of the saints.

It is easy to lose the real person in the image, to insist that all is darkness or all is light. Still ten years after her tragic death there are regular reports of "fury" at this or that incident and the Princess's memory is used for scoring points. Let it end here.

Let this service mark the point at which we let her rest in peace and dwell on her memory with thanksgiving and compassion while we pray in the words of St Paul for all those who serve our country as members of the Royal Family and most especially for the sons who were so precious to her:-

"I pray that you being rooted and established in love may have power together with all the saints to grasp what is the breadth and length and depth and height of the love of Christ and to know this love which surpasses knowledge that you might be filled with the fullness of God." Amen.