He lived a life of service

 

The death has been announced of Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh, the consort of Queen Elizabeth II, the Head of the Commonwealth. Although he was born a prince in Greece, he spent most of his life in the United Kingdom, became an officer in the Royal Navy, and went on to marry Princess Elizabeth, the heir to the throne. When his father-in-law died, Philip became the consort to Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth. So many tributes have called to mind his more than 70 years of service to the Queen, to the country and to the world. The Bahá’í view is that: “work done in the spirit of service is the highest form of worship” and he exemplified that.

One particular type of service for which Prince Philip will be remembered is his “Duke of Edinburgh’s Award Scheme”. In the Bahá’í writings it states that, “Among the greatest of all services that can possibly be rendered by man to Almighty God is the education and training of children.” More than sixty years ago, the prince saw that children were being educated, but were not universally being trained in useful skills and self-reliance. His scheme sought to offer self-improvement exercises, including an element of volunteering, some physical training, development of personal skills and participation in an expedition. This scheme, to add a wide range of training to the academic learning usually offered by schools, has spread to 144 different countries, and has had about seven million participants to date.

Prince Philip was a servant of humanity. His family background included relatives from both Eastern and Western Europe. With his broad vision, he served the Commonwealth for many years. The Commonwealth is a family of very diverse nations, and through his involvement with it, he routinely mixed with people of all colours and religions. He was well aware of the Bahá’í Faith, as the Malietoa Tanumafili II, the Head of State of Samoa, was known to him personally. The Malietoa was universally known as a Bahá’í.

He also routinely met Bahá’ís through their involvement with the World Wildlife Fund, now known as the World Wide Fund for Nature.  Prince Philip was one of the founders of this movement, and his own views on the interdependence of all life mirrored what has been clearly set out in the Bahá’í writings:  “Reflect upon the inner realities of the universe, the secret wisdoms involved, the enigmas, the inter-relationships, the rules that govern all. For every part of the universe is connected with every other part by ties that are very powerful and admit of no imbalance…”  Prince Philip’s efforts to get society to recognise this principle gradually met with some success.

Bahá’u’lláh, Who lived in the nineteenth century, was a great lover of nature, and the Bahá’í writings frequently refer to our need to properly understand the place of humanity within nature as a whole: “… even as the human body in this world, which is outwardly composed of different limbs and organs, is in reality a closely integrated, coherent entity, similarly the structure of the physical world is like unto a single being whose limbs and members are inseparably linked together.” Issues espoused in the twentieth century by the prince were often not taken up by society at large until many years later. For example, he was keenly aware of the pollution of the world’s rivers, and argued that something should actually be done about it!

Bahá’u’lláh’s son, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, lived an exemplary life of service which Bahá’ís try to follow. It is for service of all kinds that Prince Philip will be remembered. As Bahá’u’lláh put it: “Man’s merit lieth in service and virtue and not in the pageantry of wealth and riches.” Although Prince Philip lived a life surrounded by possessions and privilege, he did not connect the pomp and pageantry with his own self. That all came with the role into which his wife happened to have been born. His was a life of service, and surely exemplified this from the Bahá’í Writings: “That one indeed is a man who, today, dedicateth himself to the service of the entire human race.”