In Easter week, the UK nation and our world mourned the passing of His Royal Highness, Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh. This is a man who has stood head and shoulders above so many, in countless different ways, and yet has served the country and his Queen with grace and humility, seeking never to extol his own successes or virtues. Only now has the general populous been privy to the vast array of his credentials and achievements but we have also had illuminating insight into the enormous influence he has held in so many areas of our national and international life.

I also want to add, by way of personal context, that Easter week was also one of mourning for the Reid family as my 96 year old father, Johnnie Reid, passed on, too. Whilst not well known, unlike Prince Philip, he also led a rich, varied and valuable life. Like the Prince he was a Naval man (Merchant Navy), and my Dad found himself working from Scotland to the Caribbean, Asia to Africa. He was a marine engineer and later came to work for twenty years in west Africa (where I was born) before returning to the UK and a multitude of roles and jobs including being a steward in a golf course, a security guard, a maintenance man and a gardener. Like Prince Philip, he was a man of loyalty (married, for example, for 66 years), someone of duty and integrity.

In reflecting on Prince Philip as a family man, he was in Her Majesty’s words ‘a constant strength and stay,’ ‘a rock’ and a source of counsel and refuge. My own father was all this, too, and not least to my mother. These are descriptions, as Christians, which we attribute to God, but it was through the Prince’s own faith and theological wrestling (qualities which I can’t claim for my father), as well as an openness and sympathy for the most ordinary of people that produced in him a spiritual and social roundedness which themselves are legacies for us to emulate. Forthright he undoubtedly was, and unafraid to speak his mind, but we are reminded that it was just before that first Easter when Christ himself, who did not stand on ceremony, overturned the tables in the temple and was open to misunderstanding by the reigning authorities.

In this past week, we have contemplated upon the agony of the cross as well as the triumph of the resurrection, and in our grief for someone so dear who has passed on, we reach out with the deepest sympathy to our beloved Queen and her family (and also to my mother and wider family in our own loss). However, we are also invigorated with Easter rising by so much of what we should all aspire to be in our own calling in life. Prince Philip’s name means ‘lover of horses,’ and ne’er was a name so apt. From expert polo player to dogged carriage driver, the picture of resurrection perhaps cannot be captured more poignantly than by the Old Testament picture of Elijah’s translation to heaven in a chariot of fire. This is one which indeed ‘spurs’ us on not to languish in grief but to set our faces towards the eternal, for as St Paul says in his triumphant declaration of Christ’s resurrection: ‘what is sown is perishable, what is raised is imperishable.’ In the crucible of death all our deeds, words, motives and intentions are tried by fire and what for each one of us is left that stands that is of lasting worth and has indelibly left its mark upon others for God’s kingdom?

We would like to think that over these past few days, the Duke will have received the heartening words from the True Giver of Rewards– ‘Well done, thou good and faithful servant, receive the gold award which awaits for you.’ As we have heard, it will not have been just for those things which are noticeable and public, but for the small, personal and unwitting acts of kindness for which he will be remembered – and here again I reflect on my father’s desire to do right by everyone. Prince Philip’s life and influence itself lays down the gantlet to us all and begs the question: what we will make of our lives, whether it be nine or ninety-nine for family, our friends, our nation and for the Kingdom of the Almighty? My Dad’s 96 years also challenges me to consider what being loyal, honest and loving really means – and to sustain these qualities over such a rich, varied and adventurous life.

(Blog with thanks to Revd. Alex Aldous, school chaplain)