Greetings,
January 14, 1875, Alsace, (then) Germany: Albert Schweitzer is born.
He becomes one of the leading experts in the world on organ building.
He becomes one of the world’s greatest organists.
He becomes one of the world’s leading performers of the works of J. S. Bach.
By 1900 he has a PhD and an advanced degree in theology.
By 1905 he had written many books, including a definitive biography of Bach, a major work on organ building, books on theology, Kant, and the extremely famous The Quest for the Historical Jesus.
Despite all of the resistance and protestations of family and friends and “professionals” he encountered, in January 1905, at the age of 30, Albert Schweitzer began his studies in medicine, receiving his degree with a specialization in tropical medicine and surgery at the age of 38. He intended to go to Africa as a missionary doctor.
Yet he continued to encounter opposition. The Paris Missionary Society turned him down on the grounds that “it would only intensify their problem by encouraging intellectuals and freethinkers who could only disrupt the mission enterprise and confuse the natives with their theological improvisations...” They were not about to sponsor Schweitzer and open the floodgates to other liberals and radicals. He and his wife had to raise the money for their mission themselves.
In March 1913, Dr. and Mrs. Schweitzer left for Africa to build the hospital at Lambaréénéé in the French Congo, now Gabon. They began their health care delivery in a chicken coop, and gradually added new buildings, so the hospital now treats thousands of patients.
Yet the problems persisted. One year after their arrival at Lambaréénéé, World War I broke out. Because of their German citizenship, the Schweitzers were enemy aliens in the French colony. From the first prisoner of war camp in the Pyrenees, they were taken to a camp in St. Remy. Here, Schweitzer had odd feelings of déjà vu, feeling as though "he knew the room from some past experience. He could not lay his finger upon his strange sense of acquaintance and intimacy with the room, and began to wonder if he was losing his mind. Then he awoke one night, the mystery solved: a Van Gogh picture glowed in his mind's eye... he remembered the Van Gogh drawing of which he had vaguely been thinking and recalled that the tortured artist had once been confined for a mental breakdown in the south of France. Upon inquiry in the morning, he learned that the building had previously served as a mental institution and was indeed the very same building where Van Gogh had spent four miserable, hopeless months before his suicide.
Schweitzer then propounded the concept of “Reverence for Life.” His work continued until his death in 1965. In 1953 he received the Nobel Peace Prize. Physician, lover of animals, minister, scholarly theologian, environmentalist (Rachel Carson dedicated her seminal work Silent Spring to him), musician and musical scholar, anti-nuclear activist, philosopher, husband, father, friend -- these are the many facets of Dr. Albert Schweitzer. Today one fact remains immutable: in the words of his friend Albert Einstein, Schweitzer “did not preach and did not warn and did not dream that his example would be an ideal and comfort to innumerable people. He simply acted out of inner necessity.”
When I was 14 or so my father gave me my first recording of Schweitzer performing Bach. While it was made in the early days of the recording industry, the power and clarity of it came through. At about the same time at church I was learning about the work of Schweitzer in Africa. I was fascinated by the philosophical connections between Schweitzer, Gandhi, E. Stanley Jones, Dorothy Day, and Dag Hammarskjöld. About a year later I encountered Martin Luther King, Jr., whose ideas and work was molded by those same philosophies. Schweitzer and “Reverence for Life” continue to be major influences for my life, and I commend his writings and example to you.
Yours & His,
DED
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