29–30)
Albert Schweitzer or Reverence for Life
He was born where Germany and France meet, but he was French. As a young man he challenged thought with his new ideas about the life of Jesus and the ethical consequences of his preaching. He realized that being a Christian was not worth much if the love for one’s neighbor proclaimed in the Bible did not translate into a radical defense of life in all of its forms, especially, protecting human dignity.
He was a renowned theologian when at thirty years of age he decided to study medicine and surgery in order to devote his life to helping the poorest and most abused community of his time. Around 1913 he moved to Lambaréné, present-day Gabon, a nation on the African Atlantic. There he founded a hospital and cared for thousands of persons. Most of those who sought help suffered from leprosy and the “sleeping disease,” a deadly illness of that region. Albert treated them with affection, respected them and made them feel that they were important for just having been born. He not only cured with medicine, but with the profound conviction that each person is unique and precious in the eyes of God.
But being a doctor did not make him give up his other two passions. He was a musician and a talented organ player. He worked out a style for performing Bach’s pieces that is used and appreciated to this day. And he did not stop writing as well. His thoughts on philosophy and theology can be summarized by the title of one of his works: Reverence for Life. Schweitzer maintained that, from the tiny beetle to the imposing elephant, everyone was here with a purpose and their lives should be protected and revered. There could be no argument for destroying that which was sacred and imprinted on every being. If the life of a coleopteran was sacred, how could the life of each man and woman who inhabit this earth fail to be so?
Like all his generation, he experienced the tragedy of the two great world wars. He was opposed to them and devoted part of his life to proclaiming that armaments and the use of nuclear energy as a weapon of war were detestable and consumed the financial resources that should be applied to the development and wellbeing of the world’s population. Without wars and without weapons, there would be enough money for humanity to no longer suffer hunger, ignorance and violence. They did not listen to him, and we still continue to live with these scourges among us.
That he received the Nobel Peace Prize and that his nephew was Jean-Paul Sartre, simply add a few anecdotal facts to his life.
Beethoven and the Ninth Symphony
Two centuries earlier, Martin Luther had intuited that God was not reached by works and good intentions. The corollary of his thought was that in order to find Him it was necessary to put faith into play, because mere reason alone would not reveal His secrets. In the late 18th century, the poet Schiller suffered for that truth and composed his Ode to Liberty which was censored to read “Ode to Joy.”
His contemporary, Emmanuel Kant, gave form to this feeling and established through his implacable reasoning, that no matter how much we investigate the subject and however much science abounds in discoveries, God will not be reached this way. Perhaps Kant did not mean for things to be this way, but the great majority of his contemporaries who thrived on intuition and feelings, this meant that God was far from life, from relationships between persons and, especially, far from each other´s heart.
All these vectors led to one place and one person. That person was Ludwig van Beethoven, who, despite fierce deafness, composed one of the most celebrated musical works of our culture: his Ninth Symphony.
There are poets who feel constricted by syntax and chained by words, and they dream of breaking that structure. They seek to reduce words to their sounds. They long for the music of the syllables, rather than the objectivity of the words, and wish to emulate the musicians by nullifying meaning in their verses. Beethoven was driven down the opposite path. Dissatisfied with the sounds and scales he mastered as few could, tired of not being able to express what he felt, he did what no one had imagined, what only someone desperate could do: he put words to his symphony.
Now comes what we really want to convey, the justification of these lines. The world in which Beethoven lived was becoming distressed by the lack of divinity. God was no longer in things, God could no longer be found in lengthy pilgrimages to sanctuaries, and miraculous appearances were not to be trusted. It became known that a flower, however beautiful, no longer revealed the Creator. Also that human life was no guarantee of his existence. Even if for ages institutions—the Church, philosophy, reason—had ensured contact with God and the peace of His blessing, now everything was in the hands of each person. God is only found through faith, and faith is an act of will, an action that we have to perform, a human initiative subject to our ups and downs and our different moods. Sometimes we cling to it and at other times it escapes us.
Not surprisingly, Beethoven modified Schiller’s poem and rewrote it to his own taste. It is almost a paraphrase, a way of resorting to him without being tied by his words. What he could not say with music he said with borrowed words:
Brothers, beyond the stars
must a loving Father dwell. . ..
World, do you sense your creator?
Seek him then beyond the stars.
There are no longer certainties nor tutors. The God who can no longer be reached by reason has not abandoned humanity. He is still there and can be felt when we contemplate the immensity of the stars.
Psalm 8
He walked toward the rock where every night he sat to rest. It was near his house and its shape allowed him to lie down and see the sky. His wife was feeding the baby, born four weeks before; the other children already slept. He removed his sandals, because he liked to feel the earth itself beneath his feet. He felt that in this way his feet connected him to what was below the earth and his eyes to what was above the earth.
Then she arrived. Now the baby also slept. She sat beside him, on the same rock, and, as she did every night, she held his hand.
He thought about her hands, when she spun with her fingers and made those blankets to warm them in winter. She thought about the baby falling asleep at her breast, about that pink mouth that joined them and through which flowed milk and love.
A movement, a noise, reminded them that the sheep and the ox also slept in the yard, and that tomorrow would be a long work day. Suddenly they saw a falling star. They saw them almost every night and they loved to think about what a star might be like, where it might fall, and if someone might pick it up. He asked her, “Do you think a star will ever fall near us so we can pick it up and show it to the children? She answered, “I don’t know.” And they remained silent for a long time. It was one of those nights with a small moon, a thinning bow, almost gone, and she wondered about that opening and closing of the moon, so inexplicable and so beautiful.
They gazed at the sky. They measured distances by stades; they never knew what a light year was. Neither did they know what a star was or why they disappeared by day, but they knew that the town that lived behind the hills, their friends, who talked to the moon and awaited a reply, would never receive one. The moon was there to be admired, not to be spoken to. They did not know about the atom nor did they imagine a galaxy; for them the earth did not extend much beyond the circle of the horizon, that strange line that could never be reached.
They were almost asleep on top of the rock and beneath the sky. They liked that moment because it was when they gathered words and played with them. They did not know how they did that either, because they were words that came to them from inside. She told him, “Before going home to sleep, let’s say those words we began
