REVERENCE FOR LIFE
Mottos often have double meanings that add to their richness and relevance. Living by those mottos can also be enriching … but also so, so challenging.
Back in high school, my freshman-year social studies teacher had us research and write about a famous historical figure. She gave us only one way to choose a name: she had each of us reach into a glass bowl on her desk and pull out a slip of paper with a name written on it. I was hoping for the name of someone familiar, like a sports celebrity or founding father. Not the name of the person I drew: Albert Schweitzer. Albert who?!
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 for his work in establishing the first surgical hospital in Equatorial Africa, 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 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. 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 discernable way.
What stood out was the three-word headline, “Reverence for Life,” atop the newspaper column about Dr. Schweitzer’s life. That phrase was the motto by which Dr. Schweitzer lived. He did not originate the phrase, however; it draws from a passage in the book of the Prophet Malachi (2:5) in the Old Testament (Hebrew) Bible. “Reverence for Life” contains a subtle 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 college students, I made the deceased doctor’s motto my own. How wildly naïve I was to think I could live up to such a calling! Over my lifetime, I’ve discovered that those three words are an unbelievably demanding standard by which to live. Still, at the time, I was OK with that. I welcomed the challenge.
Today, however, I’m not so happy 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 signs of life elsewhere in the universe.
The goal of those investments - to discover in our solar system and beyond habitable worlds we could colonize, or communicate with, has set humanity on an exciting adventure of interplanetary and interstellar exploration. Sadly, captivated by casting our eyes skyward, we’ve neglected and degraded the very soil on which we stand and the water on which we depend for survival.
Today, I’m increasingly concerned that the intoxicating excitement about extraterrestrial life forms unduly distracts us from responsible stewardship of our own planet. To steer humanity back toward an environmentally sustainable path for the planet will require political, scientific, and spiritual leaders to provide motivating leadership. And that leadership will emerge from schools and teachers not a lot different from those of my youth.
Ms. McCool, I remember now, was my social studies teacher’s name. “Major McCool” is what we classmates surreptitiously called her among ourselves. She would march up and down between rows of student desks, smacking a ruler against her her palm to get 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 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 for 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?
A key step in my personal redemption, I can discern, is to champion increased funding to hire and support teachers like Ms. McCool. Educating future generations of enlightened leaders to follow Dr. Schweitzer’s motto, I now recognize, is critical to our planet’s survival. ###
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