REVISITING PROMETHEAN PEACE

Today's thoughts are focused on the life and legacy of Albert Schweitzer, almost a ghost from the past. He lived from 1875 to 1965, a very old age in those days. The context of his life includes accomplishments as a young adult polymath. He excelled in music (a scholar of the music of Johann Sebastian Bach) as an organist, in theology (he was the author of The Quest of the Historical Jesus), and later in medicine. He devoted the majority of his life to missionary medicine in Lambarene, French Equatorial Africa, now Gabon. To me, he was a Titan and a childhood hero, not your average off the shelf avatar. I don't know who the heroes are for young people today but Schweitzer came to me when I was young enough to be inspired and old enough to know what heroes were. Even then, Schweitzer was not a hero of popular culture but someone revered as much for surviving his many years as for the work he did in Africa, work not always understood or valued for what it was.

Indeed, in later life he was criticized for what some thought of as Neo-colonial oppression of the people with whom he had lived for decades and to whom he dedicated his life of medical service. He was criticized for being paternalistic and not cultivating advanced medical practice or training native Africans to be medical assistants. I was sufficiently enamored of his titanic accomplishments to read the criticisms and wonder if I understood his life as well as I might have. I don't have any evidence that the criticisms meant much to Dr. Schweitzer after so long a life of service. It is perhaps easy to see in the metaphor of Prometheus that he, too, was consigned to be chained to a rock and have his liver eaten by a raptor every day as punishment by the gods for being too cozy with human beings. Prometheus is the Titan who stole fire from the gods, gave it to man, and taught him how to use it, thus furthering progress and civilization. It was for his generosity that he was punished. How is it said these days? No good deed will go unpunished. Perhaps it is in the nature of retrospective review that we find faults measured against the social tensions and pressures of the times. It is important to dig as deeply as possible to understand the context of the life examined and the trajectory of events.

I can say why I was inspired by Dr. Schweitzer and not unduly persuaded by the criticisms. I suppose I was in the part of my life when I could be inspired. I had models of service in the caring professions and medicine was the realm in which I found the most exciting information and the most heroic individuals. Do children these days have heroes? Do they come from popular culture or are they sometimes people of more silent accomplishments and dedication? Dr. Schweitzer inspired me if only because he looked the part of a Titan: He had a flowing mane of white hair and a mustache of dramatic proportions. His face was a geography of gnarled care and woe, all the things one might imagine in someone who had labored greatly in the jungles of Africa. Yes, there was the romantic side of the sacrifice he had made. At so young an age, it was not part of my consciousness to imagine how difficult it must have been to build a village that contained a hospital run on unsophisticated generators used to power the lights used in surgery. It was part of my consciousness to understand sacrifice as heroic, titanic, risky, noble.

The context of Dr. Schweitzer's life was intriguing and almost mythical for a young boy caught up in adventure, romance, and admiration. But Dr. Schweitzer continued to accompany me as I aged and entered a medical world very different from the one he knew until the end of his long life. I never made the trek to any jungle but I always thought of my work in medicine as missionary service, albeit a truncated form compared to that of Dr. Schweitzer. Even so, now that I am in my own late stages of life, he continues to inspire me and so his life is worth revisiting, not so much as to emulate it but to find deep within it some themes that endure but which are often hidden now in our more clamorous and confusing world.

It is said that we now live in an era of hyper-individualism and over-technologizing. We have a stratified society in which we still entertain the idea of the self-made person who hacks his way into new frontiers of discovery. Perhaps that is what maintains our cultural biases and prejudices. Perhaps that is why we so easily escape into tribalism as a protective cover against those who are different from us. Perhaps we think we have much to fear and to defend. Is it really every man for himself now? Was it ever? Schweitzer began his work in Africa in 1913, just ahead of one of the greatest wars of all history for its brutalities and new killing technologies. He traveled to Europe and back during those years to raise money for his hospital, performing on the organ and giving lectures. He was not isolated in any way from the realities of war and its aftermath. And what he encountered every day in Africa was a reality of disease and suffering.

As I revisit his life now after all these years, the themes that I observe are all the more prescient for those of us in the 21^st century attempting to sort out purpose and meaning in our lives. There was the theme of polymathia and academic accomplishment transformed into his version of universal unity of thought. He came from a world of privilege and gave himself to a world emptied of advantages and teaching a version of humility and gratitude. He left a European world of gathering confusion and made a personal commitment to those whose lives were primitive by the standards of the time. He took a stand of self-abnegation in favor of an open source compassion for those less fortunate. He set aside the riddles of the world and focused on the small deeds of the everyday sacred. He modeled sacrifice and devotion. Life for him manifested from a deeper level of consciousness where service was emptied of self.

Dr. Schweitzer was a hero who emerged from the grittiness of life but whose legacy was a notion of the reverence for life. He won the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1952, but he considered the commitment to a reverence for life to be his greatest legacy, and so it has remained for me all my life. A reverence for life has at its roots a widening stream of peace that surpasses our abilities to understand but which animates all of life. It is the stream that provides sustaining waters for all living beings and things equally from Lambarene to Lisbon. It is the stream that carries humans along from one century to the next, a promethean celebration of technology and science, but also of unsurpassable compassion and love. Here is Dr. Schweitzer telling his own story as he made his way upstream on his journey to Lambarene:

“Late on the third day, at the very moment when, at sunset, we were making our way through a herd of hippopotamuses, there flashed upon my mind, unforeseen and unsought, the phrase, 'Reverence for Life.' The iron door had yielded: the path in the thicket had become visible. Now I had found my way to the idea in which world- and life-affirmation and ethics are contained side by side! Now I knew that the world-view of ethical world- and life-affirmation, together with its ideals of civilization, is founded in thought.”

And then:

“To have reverence in the face of life is to be in the grip of the eternal, unoriginated, forward-pushing will, which is the foundation of all being. It raises us above all intellectual knowledge of external objects, and grafts us on to the tree which is assured against drought because it is planted by the rivers of water. All vital religious feeling flows from reverence for life and for the necessity and for the need for ideals which is implicit in life. In reverence for life religious feeling lies before us in its most elemental and most profound form, in which it is not longer involved in explanations of the objective world, nor has anything to do with such, but is pure religious feeling founded altogether in implicit necessity and therefore devoid of care about results.”

“The world-view of reverence for life follows from taking the world as it is. And the world means the horrible in the glorious, the meaningless in the full of meaning, the sorrowful in the joyful. However it is looked at it remains to many a riddle. …. Reverence for life brings us into a spiritual relation with the world which is independent of all knowledge of the universe. Through the dark valley of resignation it leads us by an inward necessity up to the shining heights of ethical world- and life-affirmation.”

“The ethic of reverence for life constrains all, in whatever walk of life they may find themselves, to busy themselves intimately with all the human and vital processes which are being played out around them, and to give themselves as men to the man who needs human help and sympathy. It does not allow the scholar to live for his science alone, even if he is very useful to the community in so doing. It does not permit the artist to exist only for his art, even if he gives inspiration to many by its means. It refuses to let the business man imagine that he fulfills all legitimate demands in the course of his business activities. It demands from all that they should sacrifice a portion of their own lives for others.”

The myth of Prometheus has him chained and attacked by a terrifying presence in the form of an eagle. Perhaps this part of the myth is meant to teach us that we can celebrate our successes and our over-reachings—but at a price, the price of pain and suffering. The eagle ate at the liver of Prometheus each day but the liver was regenerated each night until he was finally freed from his punishment. Perhaps the story is meant to show us that there are conditions and causes as well as consequences to our best intentions but that we are also subject to a state of freedom that results from what we suffer. I imagine that pain and suffering were not foreign to Dr. Schweitzer, as they are not for anyone caring for someone else at any level of service. Yes, we rarely know the consequences of what we do or even the sources for our actions, but we act from a deep level of compassion for those in need. We see this all the time in our daily lives even if the media are focused on more dramatic phenomena.

So, I ask if you have heroes. What do they represent? Do you revisit them for the teachings they continue to offer? Have the teachings changed over time? Are the teachings more timely now? Do we even need heroes? Is it important for the hero to be celebrated or is it enough for them to be active in your own life? Do you offer them to others? I ask these questions to emphasize the importance of heroes in my own life but not as stand-alone soloists. I see Dr. Schweitzer as outstanding but also as someone who depended on countless others to give him resources and for him to receive them. In life there is giving and receiving. When we serve we also grow. We can lose some of our liver one day and have it reconstituted the next. We might not think of ourselves as titans in any form, but we can see that we are resilient and able to give in spite of what pain and suffering there might be in our lives. Prometheus shows us what this looks like. Our meditations and reflections may be visited and revisited by heroes and titans of different forms. Do we welcome these and are we curious about what they are doing there? And, in some ways, isn't meditation about self-emptying?