Rhena Schweitzer Miller

RHENA SCHWEITZER MILLER worked for her father, Albert Schweitzer, at his Lambaréné Hospital in Africa and assumed the hospital's administration after his death. From 1970 to 1999, she assisted her husband, Dr. David Miller, in his work in developing countries.

When you asked me to write, trying to speak out against the horrible barbarism of today, I was at first at a loss for words. What could I possibly have to say that might make a difference? But then, as the daughter of Albert Schweitzer and again reading in your letter: "We know there are still people all over the world who have not given up on humanness of humans, who have not lost contact with the specifically human sanity at their core, and who have maintained a reverence, an awe for the mystery of life," I realized that I could do no better than echo, and perhaps further elucidate a bit, my father's ethical precept of Reverence for Life.

This ethical imperative came to Albert Schweitzer nearly eighty years ago, in his fortieth year, one year after the onset of the First World War, during a trip on the Ogowe River to care for a sick patient. Desperate at the barbarism of the war, he was seeking "a basis in rational thought upon which a viable and ethical civilization could be built." He writes:

Slowly we crept upstream. Lost in thought I sat on the deck of the barge, struggling to find the elementary and universal conception of the ethical, which I had not discovered in any philosophy. Sheet after sheet I covered with disconnected sentences, merely to keep myself concentrated on the problem. Late on the third day, at the very moment when at sunset we were making our way through a herd of hippopotami, 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 affirmation of the world and ethics are contained side by side.

I grew up under his principle of Reverence for Life, which included life in all its forms. I was taught to pick up the drying-out worm on the path and put it back in the grass, not to kill any bugs if not absolutely necessary, not to pick flowers. Later I saw my father's practical realization of Reverence for Life in his hospital-village in the African forest. It was a place where people of all colors, creeds, and nationalities could live together and live in harmony with the domestic and wild animals, where trees and plants were respected, where a life was taken only when it was unavoidable. I, too, lived there for some years, under the spell of the world my father had created. I also had the wonderful experience of spending evenings and nights sitting around a fire with African friends, watching their dances, listening to their songs, feeling very strongly my belonging to the human family, in its diversity and its similarity.

Later I worked with my husband, David, who was a doctor, in many countries of the developing world, and we found ourselves at home in Egypt, Ethiopia, Vietnam, in the Muslim worlds of Yemen and Pakistan, and among the people of Haiti, who in all their misery did not lose their love of life. We worked mostly in villages and found that village people the world over have much in common. They accept you and befriend you when you respect their beliefs and their customs. We have worked in war zones and in famine areas where we were deeply saddened by what we saw. And we found it hard to understand how the same people who could be so friendly could in other circumstances be so cruel.

People unfortunately have killed each other since the beginning of the human race. I don't know how we can surmount the barbarism which seems to get more and more threatening. But certainly being in awe of the wonder of life in all its forms and teaching our children to respect it in all its manifestations, helping them see the beauty of our planet Earth and its inhabitants, can set them on the way toward the creation of a more peaceful and harmonious world.

My credo is expressed in these words of my father: "The deeper we look into nature, the more we recognize that it is full of life, and the more profoundly we know that all life is a secret, and that we are united with all life that is in nature, that all life is valuable, and that we are united with all this life. From this knowledge comes our spiritual relationship to the Universe."

Tenzin Gyatso, the Fourteenth Dalai Lama

TENZIN GYATSO, the Fourteenth Dalai Lama, has become a symbol of a spiritually based humanism beyond all lines of religious demarcation. He is a living sign of hope.

I call the high and light aspects of my being SPIRIT
and the dark and heavy aspects SOUL.
Soul is at home in the deep, shaded valleys.
Heavy torpid flowers saturated with black grow there.
The rivers flow like warm syrup. They empty into huge oceans of soul.
Spirit is a land of high, white peaks and glittering jewel-like lakes and flowers.
Life is sparse and sounds travel great...