ALBERT AND ME

Everybody who grew up in the 1950s had heard of Albert Schweitzer. He was that missionary doctor in Africa. The picture of the white-haired, elderly gentleman with bushy moustache, dressed in white clothes, going around taking care of sick people was an icon of the age. At a time when we had monthly air-raid drills at school to prepare for Soviet bombs and missiles, the thought of someone going around doing good deeds provided a modicum of reinsurance. (I don't think I was aware that Schweitzer had won the Nobel Prize for Peace for 1952.)

One day when I was 12 or 13 my friend Bob and I were off at a usual haunt, a Salvation Army Red Shield Store, searching through musty boxes for records. We built our collections of classics from old 78s that we could pick up for five or ten cents each. Bob pulled out a 12" Victor red seal recording of Bach's E minor Prelude and Fugue, Albert Schweitzer, organ. Albert Schweitzer an organist? Under our rules my friend found it so he had first chance to buy it and did. I was intensely curious about the strange recording. (I think it was the only single record Schweitzer recorded, although he did several multi-volume sets.) I had Bob play it for me several times even though he really wasn't a fan of organ music.

Sometime later I made a solo trip to the Salvation Army store on the off chance there was another of these Schweitzer oddities. I didn't find any, but I did find a book by him, Out of My Life and Thought. It was a tattered, paperback copy of his 1933 autobiography. I bought it, took it home, and read it like a person possessed. I would read it multiple times until the pages separated from the spine and I had to keep the loose leaves together with a rubber band. Schweitzer's life and thought opened before me. The son of a Lutheran minister in Alsace. Given music lessons at an early age. Played his first church service at nine years old. Took lessons from the great French organist Charles-Marie Widor. Went to the University of Strasbourg to study philosophy and theology. Earned a doctorate from the University of Berlin in Philosophy. Ordained a minister. Taught and published one book after another on J. S. Bach, organ building, Paul, and the book that turned the study of Jesus upside down, The Quest for the Historical Jesus.

Even as a youngster I knew this was an impressive record for someone who was barely thirty-years old. Strange that nothing turned up in the first 80 pages about becoming a missionary. Then I read chapter nine, “I resolve to become a jungle doctor.” There came these stunning paragraphs:

One brilliant summer morning at Gunsbach, during the Whitsuntide holidays–it was in 1896–as I awoke, the thought came to me that I must not accept this good fortune as a matter of course, but must give something in return.

While outside the birds sang I reflected on this thought, and before I had gotten up I came to the conclusion that until I was thirty I could consider myself justified in devoting myself to scholarship and the arts, but after that I would devote myself directly to serving humanity. I had already tried many times to find the meaning that lay hidden in the saying of Jesus: "Whosoever would save his life shall lose it, and whosoever shall lose his life for My sake and the Gospels shall save it." Now I had found the answer. I could now add outward to inward happiness.

Twenty-one years old and he decided his whole life. Sure enough, when he turned thirty he began seeking the way he would serve humanity. He was leafing through a magazine (this would be important later in my life) and found that the Paris Mission Society was seeking people to work in Gaboon. That settled it for him. He spent the next seven years studying medicine so he would work as a medical doctor in the Lambarene.

This is the quote grabbed my attention and has held it ever since: “For years I had been giving of myself in words and it was with joy that I had followed the calling of theological teacher and preacher. But this new form of activity would consist not in preaching the religion of love, but in practicing it.”

Over the next few years I bought a few more recordings of Albert Schweitzer and read another book, On the Edge of the Primeval Forest. I even contemplated buying a bust of Schweitzer I saw in a book store, but the $25 price tag was way beyond my meager means. It was just before the start of my junior year in high school that I heard the news. Albert Schweitzer had died in the Lambarene at age 90. It was strange to feel such loss for a person I had never met. I wrote a memorial for Schweitzer that was published in Le Grand Baton. And maybe that began working a change in me.

I had long planned to pursue a career in the sciences or mathematics. I was a geek, after all, complete with pocket protector and slide rule. But something drove me more and more in another direction–toward the music I so loved. To my parents’ dismay, I went to college to study choral music and conducting. And I did take some lessons in organ, of course. Always in the back of my mind, however, was that quotation from Schweitzer about practicing the religion of love. During my last year in college I saw an ad in the Lutheran magazine. The Board of World Missions was looking for someone who could teach English and choral music in Indonesia. That was the answer. I sent off a letter at once, filled out forms, and interviewed. The one catch was the person they wanted would also have to coach soccer. I was never going to be able to do that.

The Board let me down easy, assuring me that if the primary candidate didn’t work out, they would be in touch. They hoped I would find my way to serve the Lord. After much anguish, I decided to go to seminary to become a pastor. I could follow Schweitzer’s footsteps that way. So I studied, graduated, was ordained, and took a call to South Florida, a location every bit as exotic as the African jungle.

One day when I was back home on vacation (I thought of it more as a furlough to stock up on supplies), I went into a book store, and there was the bust of Schweitzer I had seen years before, rather worse for wear, being sold at half-price. I snapped it up and carried it back to Florida with me. It has sat on a high shelf watching over for me ever since. It reminds me again and again to ask whether I’m really practicing the religion of love.

It is still strange to me how a record and a book led me to finding a hero who so profoundly influenced my life. I continue to study Schweitzer’s words and to reread Out of My Life and Thought every so often, especially when I’m ready to throw in the towel.

I wish all young persons could find heroes to inspire them. They’re hard to come by today. Most politicians are disappointments, sports figures frauds, businessmen too often crooks. Even some very public religious leaders are embarrassments to the Gospel. In some neighborhoods the local drug dealer is the most admired person. He’s got money, cars, and bling. We need heroes, genuine heroes, for this age which so lacks anything heroic. How will people find their way on the pilgrim trail without those who blaze the path before them?

May the Lord God bless you on your way and greet you on your arrival.

Wayne

WHY A PILGRIM

Why do I call myself a pilgrim? That's a story that has taken almost six decades to live, so it can't be told briefly. My grandfather's 1913 edition of Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary defines pilgrim first as a wayfarer; a wander; a traveler; a stranger. It illustrates the meaning with Hebrews 11:13 in the Authorized (King James) Version: strangers and pilgrims on earth. A second meaning is one who travels far or in strange lands to holy places or shrines as a devotee. Both meanings apply to this pilgrim.I have come to see life as a journey to a holy place, but always as a stranger passing through various places. As I learned to phrase it years ago, being in but not of the world.

I received a sound religious education in Sunday School and from instruction by a decent, salt of the earth pastor of blessed memory, Ralph Riedesel. (Theres a picture of Ascension Lutheran Church below.) In my church, religious instruction slacked off markedly after confirmation around age 14. One was then qualified to be a teacher rather than a learner. What I have since discovered is that the years between 14 and 18 are really formative in growing an adult faith from the foundations of a child's faith. For the most part, though, we were on our own. Even for some one like me who was actively involved in church life during those years, there was so much to puzzle over. How did one live as a Christian day to day in the world? I knew there were moral principles involved, but there was so much more. How was a believer to regard science? Did religion have anything to do with politics? With money (other than making an offering on Sunday)? How did religion fit into history? One often got the impression that the history of Christianity consisted of the time of the apostles which was followed by nothing much until Luther and the Reformation and then nothing much again until the present, except a brief stop for the Pilgrims celebrating Thanksgiving at Plymouth. (No one happened to mention that the Pilgrims never called themselves pilgrims, by the way.) The church didn't seem to know much about the world.

In school I discovered that most teachers didn't understand much about religion. Oh, most of them probably practiced some religion, but they were often wrong about the rare religious topics they mentioned. For example, one teacher insisted that the people of England ate a lot of fish because they were Catholic.

I realize now that I cobbled together my own Christian world view from what I had learned at church, what I had read (I'll need another blog to talk about Albert Schweitzer), and also a few of things I learned in school. It's only in retrospect that I can see what they were. One part came in a biology class. The teacher, Miss A., was the typical biology teacher with years of experience and completely immersed in her subject. She had the inevitable task of teaching human reproduction as part of biology (the only time such a subject was EVER mentioned.) She managed to present the facts in such a dry, clinical fashion that she was almost able to convince a class of forty hormone-crazed adolescent boys to take permanent vows of celibacy. She also had to teach evolution. This was long before the current debate about evolution versus scientific creationism burst on the scene. She began the lecture on evolution by remarking that she believed there was God who was a creator. She was careful to say she didn't know what other people in the class believed and she wasn't trying to make anyone believe what she did, only stating what she thought. She then went on to explain evolution, never mentioning God again.

Even now I can feel the strange sensation that came over me. Here was a scientist who had religious beliefs that she didn't think were in conflict with science. She was, by the way, Jewish, not Christian, but it didnt matter. Because this thoroughly scientific person could believe in God, I knew I could as well. Since that moment I have never felt a conflict between science and religion. It would be a good many years later before I learned how to understand the Biblical accounts of creation as revealing truth without reporting scientific fact, but for that point in my life I had the piece I needed in my cognitive apparatus.

Another event was English III with Mr. C. He was a tough guy, not a tough teacher exactly, but a tough man like a prize fighter is tough. He taught English literature with a remarkable passion. It took something for anybody to get a class of 16 and 17 year old guys to read stuff like Beowulf and Macbeth. Mr. C. had no reservation about talking about religion when it touched on literature. How could you understand the pilgrimage in the Canterbury Tales without understanding religion? How could anyone make sense out the "Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner" if they didnt understand sin and redemption? I suspect this was also the first time I was exposed to Pilgrim's Progress. He even threw in some readings from the Bible, Eccelsiastes. In his view, both the themes of the Bible and its language had influenced literature and couldn't be ignored. I suppose today he would be fired. He wasn't advocating his religion (he was Roman Catholic), or even advocating religion in general, just making sure we understood that it had an impact. How different that was from a course I had in college on Western Civilization that skipped everything that had to do with religion.

Those were a few of the elements that helped me understand faith as something intertwined with daily life and not some rarified spiritual pursuit divorced from the other aspects of life. I never seriously considered a life that had no sacred element in it. For me the struggle was the right relationship between sacred and secular. I slowly developed a middle way between a bifurcated life of sacred and secular realms that never touched, and a life where there was no difference between the two so that ultimately the sacred got lost in the world.

I eventually took the coward's way out of maintaining the tension: I became a professional religious leader, a Lutheran pastor. Fortunately, I have never thought that I learned all I needed in seminary. I have continued searching for the right spiritual path for myself. A important piece in my thinking came about 20 years in reading Joseph Campbell's books The Hero with a Thousand Facesand The Mythic Image.Christianity so often put the emphasis only on getting to heaven--the return home. If you were good enough, you got to heaven. And yet the story of Jesus focuses not on the time after his transformation (the resurrection and ascension), but on the time of struggle, from the temptation to the crucifixion. And that is exactly where the emphasis should be in the Christian life. That we will arrive at the final destination in the Kingdom of God is a certainty guaranteed for us in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus. The issue is not how can we live lives good enough to someday deserve heaven (we can't), but how do we live lives now as people who are already destined for heaven.

So I see myself on this pilgrimage of life. And along the way I encounter other people. Sometimes we just cross paths for a moment, as I did with Miss A. and Mr. C., and I discover that they have handed me a map to guide me part of the way. Sometimes I get to travel with others for long stretches as I have with my friends Fr. George and Trish who meet with me every week for prayer, reading, meditation and discussion (God bless them). Sometimes I get the joy of meeting young people who are starting out on their pilgrimage, their eyes fixed on the path ahead (God bless them, too). Many times I am with people reaching the end of their pilgrimage, sometimes with their eyes looking backwards at where they have been sometimes looking ahead to the destination which is now in sight.

And so the pilgrimage.

May the Lord God bless you on your way and greet you on your arrival.

Wayne

THE DINOSAUR STEPS DOWN A NEW PATH

True confession: I met my first computer when I was 13. The computer was about five feet wide, six feet deep and seven feet tall. All it did was play tic-tac-toe. Like even the most sophisticated computer today, it didn’t always win, but it never lost. Fast forward 25 years. My first encounter with a PC. It occupied a desk in the university library, had a monitor that only displayed letters, numbers and symbols in green against a black background, and used 5 1/4" floppy disks. I faced my first computer crisis. I couldn’t figure out how to turn the thing on. The switch was hidden in the back in those days. Well, I’ve gotten more adept at computers. I use them daily for writing and research. They still present challenges to me. A while back I had to consult a twelve-year-old on how to play a computer game. Usually I consult his nine-year-old brother who doesn’t sneer at my ignorance as much. However, the brother was busy slaughtering Orcs or something. Don’t get me wrong; I’m not anti-technology. I’m just a generation or two behind whatever the newest technology is. I was still playing 78 rpm record when everyone else had moved on to 45s and LPs. (Somebody is going to ask what a record is.)

Now I discover this whole strange world of bulletin boards, chat rooms, blogs. There’s a universe out there I didn’t know existed. I make the following observations based on limited lurking. (I think that’s the right term.) First, the vast majority of people using these new means of communications are thirty to forty years younger than I am, except for the unusually large number of people who claim to be 102. Second, people put stuff out there for the public to read that in my day (did I really use that term?) we would barely have whispered to our best friend. Third, people use a language that is largely a mystery to me. I have acquired a list of abbreviations and emoticons so I finally have a clue what lol and <3.

CLUMP! That’s the dinosaur taking a first step down a new path on his pilgrimage.

May the Lord God bless you on your way and greet you on you arrival.

Wayne