dean of the University of Chicago Divinity School, introducing Dr. Schweitzer, set aside Schweitzer’s massive curriculum vitae and spoke straight from the heart: “This morning Albert Schweitzer carried a feeble little old lady’s bags. As long as we live we will never again see a person in need and be able to pass on by. Ladies and gentlemen, Dr. Albert Schweitzer.”73
Schweitzer once wrote of his decision to leave his prestigious, comfortable life in Europe: “I wanted to be a doctor so that I might be able to work without having to talk. For years I had been giving of myself in words . . . but this new form of activity would consist not in preaching the religion of love, but in practicing it.”74
He meant to make his life his argument. Mission accomplished.
March 23
If you asked for the world’s foremost therapist for desperate, suicidal people, that might be Aaron Beck, psychiatrist emeritus of the University of Pennsylvania Medical School. Beck has spent much of his professional life studying and treating despondent people. Beck found defective thinking patterns that all the suicidal people had in common. Faulty thinking, what another cognitive therapist Albert Ellis called “stinking thinking,” took them down and kept them there.
A common flaw he found in their thinking was a sense that they were basically inadequate persons, defective goods, life’s failures who just could not get it right. As in Murphy’s Law, they had convinced themselves that “anything that can go wrong will go wrong for me.” Their low opinion of themselves contaminated most everything they touched.
They also saw the prevailing state of things as permanent—fixed, static, frozen. They could see no exit. Believing that they are losers, and unable to imagine things ever getting better, they concluded that the future was hopeless.75 That surely was what Mark Twain had in mind when he said, “There is no sadder sight than a young pessimist.”
We all know on our better days when we are not depressed that life hardly works that way. We know that things are constantly changing and we know how ignorant we are of the way things are going to be one week off, much less a year away.
I sometimes think of life like the four quarters of a football game, or four trips around the track in the mile run. By those measures, I am most likely in the last quarter of the game or on my last lap around the track.
But this time of year I find myself thinking of life in terms of four seasons: spring is childhood, summer is adolescence, fall is maturity, and winter is death. I hope you will think of this spring as a gift—another chance for one more birth. Fuchsia and chartreuse, pink and green, are overwhelming brown and gray. It is spring again, and once more all things seem possible.
March 24
Do you hear what I hear? The shrieking, I mean. That is the sound of winter giving up. The dull, brown earth is surrendering its oppressive hold on us, giving up to buttercup and crocus, dandelion, forsythia, and redbud, to robins stalking and spearing earthworms in the yard, to geese piercing the sky.
Fortunate to live in a four-seasons part of the world, annually I get to cheer on the new birth. Let us raise glasses! Let us toast those deep yellows and pinks and purples, for they mean we have made it through another winter. It could have been different. Let the shrieking begin.
Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy in April of 1858, having survived another brutal winter just south of Moscow, could not contain his jubilation in a letter to his aunt and confidant Alexandra:
It’s spring! It is so good to be alive on this earth, for all good people and even for such as I. Nature, the air, everything is drenched in hope, future, a wonderful future. The springtime has such a powerful effect on me that I sometimes catch myself imagining I am a plant that has just opened and spread its leaves among all the other plants and is going to grow up simply, peacefully and joyfully on the good Lord’s earth. When this happens, such a fermentation, purification, and orchestration goes on inside me that anyone that has not experienced it himself could not imagine it himself. Away with all the old worn-out things . . . to the devil with them all! Make way for this wonderful plant that is filling out its buds and growing in the spring.76
“Everything is drenched in hope.” Or, in the words of scripture: “Winter is past . . . flowers cover the earth, it’s time to sing.”77
Hallelujah! Amen!
March 25
“A child, any child, is a garden, and a garden without a wall.” So wrote novelist and Presbyterian clergyman Frederick Buechner. Staying with the garden metaphor, Buechner wrote:
Anything can enter there . . . and anything can depart, quite at will, as long as the wall-lessness lasts: birds and friends, secrets, hates, games, fear, and magic of all sorts. But then . . . a wall appears, and then . . . the garden is enclosed. Whatever is there is there to stay.78
Buechner’s metaphor helped me connect with an event in the life of Jesse Stuart. In 1954, Kentucky named him poet laureate. He wrote thirty-two books, four hundred short stories, and gave five thousand lectures all around the world.
As a schoolboy, Stuart had a remarkably undistinguished career. However, in Mrs. Hamilton’s history class, one day he spoke a few words that moved Mrs. Hamilton to tell the class that “Jesse sounded just like a future Patrick Henry in this room.” Mrs. Hamilton may not have remembered a week later even speaking those words. She surely never imagined how formative that one sentence would become in Jesse’s life. But Jesse never forgot, and decades later he singled out that moment in Mrs. Hamilton’s history class as a moment of recognition he sorely needed at that point in his life.79
I hope people who go into teaching these days aspire to become a Mrs. Hamilton. I hope their greater aim as they instruct is to inspire children to believe in themselves, to put an “I am able” thought in their minds before those walls start going up and the garden becomes enclosed.
Lee Iacocca, I believe, tells it right: “In a completely rational society, the best of us would be teachers and the rest of us would have to settle for something less, because passing civilization along from one generation to the next ought to be the highest honor and the highest responsibility anyone could have.”
March 26
Once upon a time there was an old sea captain who for decades sailed his vessel flawlessly, earning the devotion and admiration of all his crew. The venerable captain had one peculiarity. Every day before sailing he went to his cabin for a few moments alone. The crew thought perhaps he was saying prayers for himself and his men. Whatever he was doing, they assumed it was the key to his sailing prowess.
One day a crew member followed him on his morning routine and watched through the keyhole. He saw the captain go to a locked box, unlock it, take out a scrap of paper, read it, return it to the box, and lock it in. After that ritual he left the cabin with a smile on his face and confidently sailed another day.
When the old captain died, the crew could not wait to get to that locked box and see what was on the paper. After they reverently buried him at sea, they reverently tiptoed down to his cabin, unlocked the door, unlocked the box, opened it, and unfolded the creased, yellowed paper, which read: “The right side is the starboard side.”
We need regularly to peek outside our rut and ask the really big one: “What is this thing called life all about? Where is it going? Am I being true to myself? Am I on course, or has my vessel run aground?”
“Now
