The phrase “reverence for life” came to the famous Albert Schweitzer during his time in Africa as a medical missionary, where he built a hospital in a remote area to treat thousands of people who had had no access to modern medicine. For 50 years, until his death in 1965, he would write about the meaning of this phrase in individual morality, in theology, and in the global socio-political world.
I loved the concept when I came across it in my early 20’s. Finding my bearings in the grown-up world while making my own decisions about right and wrong in all kinds of situations and scenarios for the first time was frightening. Anchoring myself in this single thought helped.
Albert Schweitzer im Urwaldhospital Lambarene (Quelle: schweitzerfellowship.wordpress.com)
Reverence for life grows out of the idea that every living thing wants to stay alive and every living thing wants to and is here to thrive and live its best life. From this idea comes the philosophy that living as a good human being means to respect and protect the lives of all other people and all other living beings – including the lives of plants and creatures – as well as to help other living beings to thrive.
When we work on living as an equal among equals, we find ourselves developing more and more reverence for all lives. The depth of our conviction that we are all equals grows as we act out of reverence for one another’s lives.
Think of what the opposite means: anything that harms or seeks to obstruct life for a person or for other living beings is evil. We have many, many evils in our society, from the state of our incarceration facilities and policies, to the rampant killing of people by police; from environmental destruction to racial injustice; from the blame game we play with homelessness to the do-nothing approach to gun violence.
Younger adults searching for an ethical path for living life can find in the concept of reverence for life a worthy match for their longing to be so thoroughly grounded in being a good person that all their choices and decisions will be right and good. Of course, it doesn’t exactly happen that way.
The learning curve for having a personal ethic is usually steep, and comes as a result of trying to apply an idea to real-life circumstances. Albert Schweitzer worked hard to apply this thought to everything from surgical decisions in his medical hut in the jungle to the global threat of nuclear war. To make it our own, we have to work on it as diligently as he did.
Notes:
Reverence for Life: The Words of Albert Schweitzer, compiled by Harold E. Robles
James Brabazon, author of Albert Schweitzer: A Biography, defined Reverence for Life as follows: Reverence for Life says that the only thing we are absolutely sure of is that we live and want to go on living. This is something that we share with everything else that lives, from elephants to blades of grass—and, of course, every human being. So we are brothers and sisters to all living things, and owe to all of them the same care and respect, that we wish for ourselves
AMA Journal of Ethics, December 2006, Albert Schweitzer: His Experience and Example, byJennifer Kasten, MSc