REVERENCE FOR LIFE
While we cast our eyes to the skies in search of potentially habitable planets in our solar system and beyond, we seem unaware that our planet earth is becoming a little less habitable each day.
Years ago, when I was a freshman in high school, our social studies teacher assigned each of us the task of researching and writing about the historical importance of a famous person.
We were not allowed to choose who that person might be. Instead, our teacher instructed each of us to draw from a glass fishbowl on her desk one of the pieces of paper on each of which she had written an important person’s name. I was hoping for the name of someone familiar, like a sports celebrity or a founding father, not the name of the person I drew: Albert Schweitzer.
To remind those to whom that name may be only vaguely familiar, Dr. Albert Schweitzer was an early twentieth century German Lutheran theologian, musicologist, organist, writer, philosopher, physician, and humanitarian.
He was born in 1875 and studied music and religion as a young man before taking up medicine to be more than just a preacher. He aspired to be both spiritual and physical healer, though not in Europe among his aristocratic colleagues, but by administering to the sick in the impoverished villages of Africa.
At age 77 in 1952, just three years before I was assigned the task to research him, Dr. Schweitzer was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. The Peace Prize recognized his work in establishing the first surgical hospital in Equatorial Africa, in a French colonial territory that in 1958 would become the independent nation of Gabon.
For my class assignment I duly chronicled Dr. Schweitzer’s life and accomplishments, preparing my notes from the school library’s Encyclopedia Britannica – no Google, no Wikipedia in those days from which to copy and paste – and submitted my handwritten five-page report, the minimum number of pages our teacher required for a passing grade. Then I moved on to more immediate coming-of-age challenges and forgot about the good German doctor in Africa.
Some years later, in 1965 when I had completed college and was still exploring what the future held for me, I again by chance came across Dr. Schweitzer’s name. This time it was in a frontpage newspaper article reporting his death. For some reason I suddenly felt a sense of loss for this man whom I had never met and whose work had not directly touched me in any way.
What stood out was the three-word headline, “Reverence for Life,” atop the newspaper column about Dr. Schweitzer’s life. That phrase, Reverence for Life, was the motto by which Dr. Schweitzer lived. He did not originate that motto, though; the phrase draws from a passage in the book of the Prophet Malachi (2:5) in the Old Testament (Hebrew) Bible.
“Reverence for Life,” the motto by which Dr. Schweitzer chose to live contains the dual commitment both to protect living creatures and to dedicate oneself to doing so consistently throughout one’s lifetime.
In a moment of irrational optimism that too often is a shortcoming of recent college graduates, I decided to make the deceased doctor’s motto my own. How wildly naïve I was! Over my own lifetime I’ve discovered that those three words are an unbelievably demanding metric by which to live.
At the time, I was OK with that. I welcomed the challenge. Today, I’m not so OK with how I’ve focused my energies all too often on more selfish interests, sometimes at the expense of living things - plant and animal - with which I share the planet.
One irony I’ve experienced is the amount of effort and money that we as a nation have put into trying to discover life and habitable planets elsewhere in the universe. Life beyond earth is an understandable driver of exploring the unknown. It has commanded huge public investments in satellite telescopes, robotic probes, and manned lunar missions.
The goal of these investments - to discover whether there are other planets we could colonize, or whether we are alone in the cosmos or merely one of scores of thousands of habitable spheres in space – has set mankind on an endless adventure of interplanetary and interstellar exploration.
I’m now painfully aware that while we’ve been casting our eyes to the skies, we’ve been neglecting and degrading the very soil on which we stand and the water on which we depend for our survival here on earth.
I’m increasingly concerned that the intoxicating excitement about extraterrestrial life forms can unduly distract us from responsible stewardship of our own planet. Such stewardship will demand systematic and sustained effort by our political, scientific and spiritual leaders to redirect humanity from the unsustainable path on which we now appear to find ourselves.
Ms. McCool, I remember now, was my social studies teacher’s name. “Major McCool” is what we classmates surreptitiously called her among ourselves. She’d march up and down between our rows of student desks holding a 12-inch wooden ruler in one hand and using it to slap the palm of her other hand loud enough to keep our attention and make her lesson points.
I wonder now what Ms. McCool would think about the impact that a piece of paper in the glass fishbowl had on one of her students. She’d smile, I suppose, at the thought that I’ve tried to live my life by the motto of a German jungle doctor.
What stings for me today is the awareness that I’ve now reached the same age at which Dr. Schweitzer was recognized with a Nobel Prize for his work and sacrifice. I’m humbled by that awareness and by how far I have fallen short of my aspirations to follow in his steps.
I also recognize that I don’t have a lot of time left for redemption from my relatively privileged life. Today we live in a world with a population three times what it was at the end of the jungle doctor’s life. I suspect that we’ll collectively require the skills and resolve of a thousand Albert Schweitzers to help us steward our living planet in a more responsible and sustainable direction. I know current conditions are dire and challenges are great, but I also believe we still have time. But where do I, do we, begin?
One step toward personal redemption I know we can take together is to advocate for more funding to hire and support teachers like Ms. McCool. Educating and equipping new generations to act where my generation has fallen short in following Dr. Schweitzer’s motto is, I believe, critical to our planet’s survival. ###
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