The Forgotten Legacy of Albert Schweitzer

 

I have a lot of books on the go. Always. If they don't have a bookmark in them there is a stack waiting to be read at the opportune moment. This means that some books take a long time to be completed, bumped by a newly arrived hold at the library or general lack of discipline.

One of the "in progress" books is Albert Schweitzer by James Brabazon, what appears to be the definitive biography of one of the great figures of the 20th century. I became curious about him when I read that Rachel Carson revered him for the development of his "reverence for life" principle, one she held dear. I realized that I was aware of Schweitzer as a significant person yet knew little about him. I vaguely recall hearing as a young that he was a Christian but not the correct sort, even though he devoted most of his adult life to medical service in Africa.

This biography is a 500-pager and I'm only about a third of the way in yet I'm almost overwhelmed by the story of his life-long brilliance. Actually, as a young boy he was a wretched student and his pastor father despaired that he would eventually be unemployable. Then his astonishing brain, coupled with boundless energy, took hold. He became exceptional at mathematics, a skill he applied to his appreciation of the music of Bach. Schweitzer became an organ virtuoso, even pioneering new ways to build them, and was central to a Bach revival in the late 19th century. He excelled at philosophy and also loved theology, eventually becoming a pastor himself. 

I now appreciated that the reason I was warned off Schweitzer was that he wrote The Quest of the Historical Jesus, a book that shook the theological world because he concluded that Jesus of Nazareth was a Jewish person, not God Incarnate, who died but did not rise, although he may have believed that he would. Schweitzer wanted to wade through the accretions of the religion that developed around Jesus as the Messiah and reconnect with his essence.

Well, how is that for a barely acceptable summary of the thesis of the book? The reverberations from Schweitzer's conclusions were considerable and he was shunned by many. Yet he loved Jesus and was determined to become his disciple with the fullness of his own life. He felt that his choice to go to Africa as a medical missionary was a small reparation for the colonial exploitation of European empires. It's hard to imagine any more passionate Christian in terms of devoted service even though he was dismissed as not a Christian by many. 

I do not share Schweitzer's analysis of the gospels and Jesus' mission and on Easter morning I will celebrate the Risen Christ. Yet I can admire his devotion and the breadth of his contributions to culture in ways I couldn't in my twenties. He took up his own cross to follow Jesus with a courage that impresses me.

I decided to write this blog entry even though I'm only 170 pages in but I look forward to reading on and sharing more of what I glean along the way.  

Arrest those Seditious Quakers!

The Christian denomination known as the Society of Friends or the Quakers has intrigued me for as long as I can remember. They are the ones who are staunchly non-hierarchical in their structure, including worship, and are inclined toward silence when they gather. Most modern Quaker communities have some form of pastor who offers a message and they sing but they are definitely not "happy clappy" Christians. I often describe the United Church as a herd of cats but the Quakers may outdo us.

Quakers have traditionally been pacifists during war but activists in many ways. In 19th century America they were opposed to slavery and courageous in support of the Underground Railway. Historically members have been persecuted, imprisoned, even executed for their beliefs.

We might assume that this is a historical reality but recently a gathering of Quaker women in a  Meeting House in London, Great Britain, was raided by police. Here is a portion of The Guardian report: 

Police have raided a Quaker meeting house and arrested six women attending a gathering of the protest group Youth Demand.

More than 20 uniformed police, some equipped with Tasers, forced their way into the Westminster meeting house at 7.15pm on Thursday, according to a statement by the Quakers.

“No one has been arrested in a Quaker meeting house in living memory,” said Paul Parker, the recording clerk for Quakers in Britain.

“This aggressive violation of our place of worship and the forceful removal of young people holding a protest group meeting clearly shows what happens when a society criminalises protest.

“Freedom of speech, assembly, and fair trials are an essential part of free public debate which underpins democracy.”

In a video posted on Youth Demand’s Facebook page, a woman who claimed to have attended the meeting described it as a “publicly advertised welcome talk” about the group. She said police seized attenders’ phones and laptops.

Great Britain has adopted laws regarding assembly that many describe as draconian  and there  have been shocking sentences handed down to individuals who have not committed violence or would normally be considered criminals. 

Some days I wonder where democracies are headed. Did these police officers have any sense of embarrassment about what they did? Who thought this raid would be in the best interests of society? And what about freedom of religious assembly and expression? 

Another report says that those not arrested chose not to offer the officers tea, which is surely a misdemeanour in Britain.  I support this act of civil disobedience! 

Sorrow for Gaza, the West Bank & Israel

 Good Friday in 2023 was on this date, April 7, in 2023 and we were on an eleven hour flight from Toronto to Tel Aviv, Israel. We arrived the morning of Holy Saturday to the warm greeting of Ruth's step-sister and her husband. Despite sleep depravation and jet lag we drove straight to Jerusalem and rambled round the streets of the Old City, including a mystical evening visit to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. The next morning we were are the Garden Tomb for Easter worship where I had as much a sense of joy observing butterflies amidst the abundant flowers as from the packed service. 

I have been haunted during the past week in contemplating what was a wonderful time in Israel in many respects. We realized quickly that our beloved family members knew very little about Palestinian Christians despite being long-time residents in Israel as part of an evangelical ministry. And while they lived very close to the West Bank and at one point we drove within 40 kilometres of Gaza we couldn't talk about the separation some describe as apartheid either. 

My spirit is troubled by what we didn't explore even though we had a unique trip in many respects. I feel...what... shame, sorrow, rage? Should we have gone, and should we have pushed harder for more information despite what we already were aware of? Should we have asked for the opportunity to meet Palestinian Christians? 

 In the past few days we've heard that between 15,000 and 17,000 children have died in Gaza. Even though the Hamas attacks on Israel were barbaric these deaths in retaliation are inexcusable and a monstrous sin against humanity and God/Allah/Yahweh. 

There was also the news that the Israeli military now admits that the 15 Palestine Red Crescent medics killed by its forces last month were unarmed and in ambulances driving slowly with flashing lights. This admission comes after the initial claim that they were acting suspiciously. It took a cell phone video of this massacre to get closer to the truth, including the burial of the bodies in a mass grave. In the West Bank the situation continues to deteriorate with attacks on Palestinian villages, the destruction of homes, and lengthy detentions without charges. 

We have to acknowledge that Israelis live with the sense that they are under seige and families mourn or wait in the hope of release of family members held captive by Hamas. We know that our family members lived with huge stress until their relocation to the United States. We can't minimize this. 

And yet...What will happen to the new generation of Palestinian children, the ones who survive and grow up to hate Israelis? What is happening to the Israeli soldiers, young people we saw everywhere, who are agents of war and too often involved in atrocities which may haunt them for a lifetime?  

For me it all feels like Good Friday, regardless of religion, a time of sorrow and darkness and I really have no answers or peace. 

HBC & Christianity

 

Everything must go! Some of us are so old (me) that we remember department stores under the Eatons and Simpsons banners. One brand that outlived these two was Hudson's Bay which recently went into receivership as well. Nearly all the stores began selling off their inventory and the remaining six may not survive either.

 When Ruth and I lived in Toronto in the late 1970s I was a seminary student working with a United Church across Bloor St. from the big Hudson's Bay store a huge distance in every way from the origins of the trading company that spread across what was to become Canada. It could be argued that without the Hudson's Bay Company Canada as a nation would never have come about. I can't recall ever making a connection between this retail story and the history of HBC. 

Full-size birch bark canoe made in Lake Savant, Ontario in the early 20th century. It can be seen on display hanging from the ceiling in the HBC Gallery. Image © Manitoba Museum 

I haven't seen much during these past few weeks about the connection between HBC and the spread of Christianity as a partner in colonization. When I looked I found an article from a couple of years ago called A Corporate Christianity: Religion in the Early Modern Hudson’s Bay Company by Tolly Bradford. It begins: 

The early modern Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC) built a form of Christianity that was decidedly corporate in its design. Unlike the way Catholicism in the French fur trade was deployed to achieve imperial as well as commercial ends, Christianity in the HBC was positioned exclusively with commerce in mind. This meant it was used not to colonize Indigenous cultures or spaces but to control and protect the company’s overseas resources and support corporate relations in London. Even when this use changed in the early 1800s as baptism and religious education was offered to mixed-ancestry children of company men, the corporate agenda remained at the heart of the company’s use of religion. 

I have seen that in the discussion about the liquidization of HBC there is reference to the thousands of historical artifacts collected over the centuries. There are about 27,000 pieces now part of the Manitoba Museum with approximately two-thirds of the artifacts of First Nations, Métis, and Inuit origin.Perhaps this museum collection would be better served remaining intact, but should there be a discussion about repatriating some of these objects to First Nations and other Indigenous groups? 

I did go back to a Globe and Mail article written by Tanya Talaga a month ago in which she is insightful, as always. She writes about Rupert's Land the vast area established under British Charter 355 years ago: 

To be clear, this land was taken from the millions of Indigenous Peoples who lived on it. The Christian missionaries followed, bringing with them a belief in their right to dominate and convert, an original sin that would lead to forced attendance in Indian Residential Schools, the creation of the Indian Act and the othering of Indigenous Peoples.

Some Christian denominations, including the United Church, have acknowledged their sin of complicity with governments in Residential Schools and have begun the process of reconciliation. We can hope that the broader discussion continues with the dissolution of the Hudson's Bay corporation. We can't take an "everything must go" attitude toward the background of European expansion and colonization  in North America with all its costs for Indigenous peoples. 

The Spiritual Solace of a Waterfall

 

                                                     Buttermilk Falls -- April 4 2025 -- Ruth Mundy 

With what deep murmurs through time’s silent stealth

Doth thy transparent, cool, and wat’ry wealth

Here flowing fall,

And chide, and call,

As if his liquid, loose retinue stay’d

Ling’ring, and were of this steep place afraid;

The common pass

Where, clear as glass,

All must descend

Not to an end,

But quicken’d by this deep and rocky grave,

Rise to a longer course more bright and brave.

Dear stream! dear bank! where often I

Have sat, and pleased my pensive eye ;
Why, since each drop of thy quick store
Runs thither whence it flow’d before,
Should poor souls fear a shade or night,
Who came—sure—from a sea of light?
Or, since those drops are all sent back
So sure to Thee that none doth lack,
Why should frail flesh doubt any more
That what God takes He’ll not restore?

 from Water-fall by 17th century mystical Welsh Anglican poet Henry Vaughan. 

In Christian theology, "kairos" refers to God's appointed or opportune time, a specific moment or season for action, conversion, and transformation, distinct from the linear flow of time (chronos).  

But let justice roll down like water
    and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream. Amos 5:24 NRSVue 

Yesterday we paddled for the first time in 2025, along a stretch of the Salmon River north of Napanee. Getting out in a canoe or kayak is definitely a seasonal lift for us although the large number of trees along the banks downed by the ice storm was sobering. Nearly all of them, mostly maples, had buds on them which made the loss more poignant somehow. 

On our trip home we made a stop at Buttermilk Falls because we knew that the significant precipitation of the past week would likely mean they were roaring, and they were. It's impossible to describe the sonic cocoon one enters into next to a waterfall or, even better, behind one. Everything else is pushed into the background and a kairos moment unfolds. We agreed that this was an "I-thou" experience, to borrow a term about relationship from theologian Martin Buber. Waterfalls can feel like living entities -- "thou" rather than "it" and we have been blessed with numerous experiences through the years, a couple of them unnerving.

When we lived in Northern Ontario we paddled the Sand River in Algoma, with the portage around Lady Evelyn Falls so close to the lip that the spray rises by the sign. Probably our best experiences of various falls were in Iceland where a new cascade was visible around every curve of the highway, all of them fed by glaciers. As Canadians we have visited Niagara Falls on a number of occasions and I once took a visiting Israeli guide named Carmy there -- he was astounded. 

Two years ago we finally visited Ein Gedi in the Judean wilderness of Israel, the place where the fugitive David hid from the pursuing King Saul. Was this simply a remote hideout with a good source of water or was there some solace from the sight and sound? When Jesus went into the wilderness to prepare for his ministry was there a similar watercourse for sustenance? 

I'm just happy that it occurred to us to make the detour yesterday on our return drive and as geezers we can do as we please! 

Can we describe a relationship with a waterfall as spiritual or even religious? You've probably guessed my answer. 

                                                

                                                                   Ruth at Ein Gedi, April 2023

16th C Religion as a Blood Sport

 

The second season of Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light is available to view and some reviewers suggest that it is even better than the excellent first series. They are both based on the Man Booker prize-winning novels by the late, great Hilary Mantel. It's hard to imagine a series not being worthwhile when both Mark Rylance (Thomas Cromwell) and Damien Lewis (Henry VIII) are central characters. 

We've started this second season and there is a scene in episode two, titled Obedience, where Cromwell visits Shaftesbury Abbey to meet with a nun named Dorothea, the daughter of Cardinal Wolsey. Needless to say, supposedly celibate priests with offspring isn't in the RC acceptable practices manual but it happened. Cromwell also speaks with Abbess Elizabeth Zouche (above) who was one of the most powerful background persons in England at the time, heading an immensely wealthy convent. Both of these women are actual historical figures although these meetings are speculative. 

Religion was pervasive in every aspect of life in the 16th century yet hypocrisy and viciousness, including murder and execution, was rampant. 

At this time Henry was the proto-typical Orange Menace, complete with ginger hair, breaking with the Roman Catholic Church in order to marry again, and again, and again... As his consolidation of the role as head of the new Church of England (Anglican) progressed he dissolved the monasteries and convents with trumped up (couldn't resist) charges of sedition and corruption so that he could plunder their holdings, including lands. 

Shaftesbury Abbey was one of the many religious complexes not only emptied of wealth and occupants but physically destroyed. There is a historic site today but it is situated amidst the ruins. In 2019 the dissolution document from the 1530s was discovered with Abbess Zouche's signature. She received a huge pension for acquiesing and managed to keep her head on her shoulders. . 

This episode of The Mirror and the Light is dramatic, in a quiet way, for reasons I won't share in the event you watch. As with many of the other episodes it provides insight into a tumultous era that was God-haunted and brutal.

An acclaimed novel on the influence of women in convents, often the "spares" in wealthy families who can't be married off, is Matrix by Lauren Groff. Another is Hild by Nicola Griffith. Both are worthwhile reading.  

Bringing in the Sheaves and the Simpsons?

Bringing in the sheaves,

Bringing in the sheaves,

We shall come rejoicing, bringing in the sheaves (repeat & repeat & repeat)

How many movies and television shows depicted earnest Christians of an earlier day in their little churches warbling one of what were apparently the only two hymns they knew. These olden days hymns were Amazing Grace and Bringing in the Sheaves, although only the first verse for the former and the chorus for the latter. Sheaves made it into multiple episodes of Little House on the Prairie (not surprising) but also the Simpsons and Two and a Half Men. I was impressed to see that it  is also in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2. 

Today's psalm reading is 126 with the heading A Harvest of Joy. I may have known that this was the inspiration for Bringing in the Sheaves but I had forgotten. A quick check reveals that it didn't make it into Voices United but it wasn't in the old Blue Hymnary either. When I read the lyrics I can appreciate why.

Nostalgia and corniness aside, this psalm that could be an antidote to the seemingly joyless realities of the moment. These are uncertain times for Canadians as our American neighbour, our "best friend whether we want them to be or not" has stabbed us in the back, led by their lunatic president. We are also dealing with "wars and the rumours of wars" and a global climate emergency. To put it in theological terms, it all sucks, or so it seems.  

While circumstances may feel like a nightmare at times we are invited to trust that God is with us and will restore our fortunes. This may be a tall order but pessimism and despair really aren't attractive options. Our Creator and Redeemer will give us good dreams, replacing our tears with laughter. Could we laugh at the surreal imposition of tariffs on a small island off the south coast of Australia populated only by penguins? 

My apologies if I have planted an ear worm for your day...bringing in the sheaves...

When the Lord restored the fortunes of Zion,

    we were like those who dream.  

Then our mouth was filled with laughter
    and our tongue with shouts of joy;
then it was said among the nations,
    “The Lord has done great things for them.”
 The Lord has done great things for us,
    and we rejoiced.

 Restore our fortunes, O Lord,
  like the watercourses in the Negeb.
 May those who sow in tears
    reap with shouts of joy.
 Those who go out weeping,
    bearing the seed for sowing,
shall come home with shouts of joy,
    carrying their sheaves.

Psalm 126 NRSVue