What Does It Mean to Be Human?: Reverence for Life Reaffirmed by Responses from Around the World
288
What Does It Mean to Be Human?: Reverence for Life Reaffirmed by Responses from Around the World
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Overview
In an inspirational act of faith and hope, nearly one hundred contributors--social activists, thinkers, artists and spiritual leaders--reflect with poignant candor on our shared human condition and attempt to define a core set of human values in our rapidly changing socity.
Contributors include:
* The Dalai Lama
* Wilma Mankiller
* Oscar Arias
* Jimmy Carter
* Cornel West
* Jack Miles
* Mother Teresa
* Nancy Willard
* Elie Wiesel
* James Earl Jones
* Joan Chittister
* Mary Evelyn Tucker
* Vaclav Havel
* Archbishop Desmund Tutu
What Does It Mean To Be Human? is a vital meditation on the endless possibilities of our humanity.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780312271640 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | St. Martin's Publishing Group |
| Publication date: | 08/14/2000 |
| Sold by: | Macmillan |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 288 |
| File size: | 411 KB |
About the Author
Frederick Franck is the author of 27 books including the classic Zen of Seeing..
Richard Connolly teaches at SUNY.
Janis Roze teaches at CUNY.
Frederick Franck is the author of twenty-seven books including the classic Zen of Seeing, My Days with Albert Schweitzer, and A Little Compendium on That Which Matters.
Janis Roze teaches biology at CUNY.
Richard Connolly is a communications art professor at SUNY.
Read an Excerpt
What Does It Mean to Be Human
Reverence for Life Reaffirmed by Responses from Around the World
By Frederick Franck, Janis Roze, Richard Connolly
St. Martin's Press
Copyright © 2000 Circumstantial ProductionsAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-312-27164-0
CHAPTER 1
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 distances.
There is soul music, soul food, and soul love.
People need to climb the mountain not simply because it is there.
But because the soulful divinity needs to be mated with the Spirit.
Deep down we must have real affection for each other, a clear recognition of our shared human status. At the same time we must openly accept all ideologies and systems as means of solving humanity's problems. No matter how strong the wind of evil may blow, the flame of truth cannot be extinguished.
Rabbi Avraham Soetendorf
RABBI AVRAHAM SOETENDORF is a national icon in Holland, where his interfaith and ecumenical work are universally respected as expressions of what it means to be truly human.
When I was three months old the Gestapo broke into our house in the Jewish "Jodenbuurt" quarter in Amsterdam where in 1943 all the Jews had been ordered to live.
The leader of the group watched me, a baby, three months old, and said, "What a pity that this is a Jewish child."
My father stood up: "How lucky he is, because whatever will happen to him, he will not grow up to be a son of a murderer." The Gestapo hit my father, shouted, and screamed, "Jew-dogs, we will be back to round you up." My father always said that there had been tears in the eyes of the Gestapo leader. These tears saved our lives. That night I was handed over to members of the resistance and my parents went into hiding. A week or so later, a man stood in front of a house in Velp, near Arnhem, with a suitcase. He knocked on the door. A woman, forty-seven years old, German-born, opened the door. He asked her whether she would be prepared to take care of a Jewish baby. If she had said, "It is too dangerous; our neighbors are collaborators with the Nazis; I have an adolescent son; there is a concentration of German soldiers nearby," for all that was true, I, the baby in the suitcase, would not be alive today, would have been one of the one and a half million children that were murdered by the Nazis. But because she opened her door and gave me support and love during the next two terrible war years, I live and work and long for the redemption of the world. My personal story is a universal tale.
God has constituted it in such a way that during the first three or four years of our existence we cannot survive but with the support, protection, and love of others.
Thus it is our human duty as coworkers in God's creation, being created in His image, to assure that all infants will survive and not suffer because of the effects of war, hunger, curable diseases, and pollution. The difference between life and death for millions of children every year is whether the door to massive practical help is opened or closed by humanity. During the last two years I have spoken intimately to tens of thousands of youngsters at schools all over Holland. And I have been exceedingly encouraged.
The surface of egoism, nihilism and the search for money and immediate satisfaction, can easily be broken by one's authentic story. And behind it we find a passion for spiritual values, a willingness to participate actively in endeavors of, for example, Amnesty International, in development projects, ecological efforts, and to combine forces against racism. But this reservoir of hope is not used. On the contrary, the teachers, those who are asked to give positive examples, and among them politicians, are not the teachers of compassion, but the teachers of doom and self-preservation. I feel deep in my heart, in my bones, that we are living in a time that can be called the birth passage of the messianic age.
It is the fiftieth year according to the biblical mode of the Jubilee year, a time when the slaves should be freed, when all debts should be annulled that weigh heavily on so many countries in development, when all wars should be suspended, when all of humankind should share the fruits of the earth. God has given us this sacred time. And time is a gift, if we learn to sanctify it. Whatever was not possible up to now is possible. Whatever efforts for peace were frustrated before will be realized. And it is up to over 4 billion people who have at least an inner link with their various spiritual traditions, 2 billion Christians, over 1 billion Muslims, 1 billion Buddhists and Hindus, Jews, Indians, indigenous people's traditions, etc., to return to their original task of Tikun Olam, the restoration of the world. We have to make use of sacred time. We have to see time hold in the profane. I suggest symbolic steps to engender inspiration and willingness to heal the gap between, on the one hand, the politically elected, who complain about lack of public support for courageous acts in order to serve universal goals, like ecological balance, often to contravene national interests, and, on the other hand, the civilians, citizens of the world, who blame the politicians for not showing political will.
With the Dalai Lama, my soul friend, I discussed setting out on a journey of reconciliation. A number of spiritual leaders from the various spiritual traditions would visit places sacred in the various religious cultures like the Wailing Wall and the El Aksa Mosque, the holy graves all in Jerusalem next to one another other, like Mecca, the Vatican, places of the Indians in North America, India, China. In every place representatives of the spiritual tradition that is devoted to this space of holiness would lead a prayer service, and we would all join, to show love that is beyond formal respect.
Yes, there are more roads that lead to the truth. Governments should agree on a budget for the earth, to reassign national budgets in such a way that enough funds would become available to alleviate hunger, provide medical services so that no child will die due to manageable causes. Every citizen would be taxed extra for this universal effort, according to his or her means. Countries and groups within the same national borders that are at odds with each other would suspend all war efforts, in order to join forces in this war on want.
I call upon all spiritual, political, economic, cultural, scientific forces to join in this cooperation with God, the source of all life force. This is the time for reconciliation in the Middle East, in Africa, in Europe, in the whole fractured world. Is it only utopian, a poetic expression of one individual who once has been saved? On the contrary, I believe it is practical and doable.
We have the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, we will soon have an earth charter, delineating our duties toward all living on this planet, and we still hold the various spiritual codes. They all point to our holy task. We don't know why, for God, the crying of a child is more important than all the galaxies, but we know it to be so. The crying should turn into laughter by the end of this millennium, and at least 18 million infants who are sentenced to death, if we stand on the safe pavement and do nothing more than already is done by courageous agencies, should be saved.
And God will bless the work of our hands.
These words are dedicated to Mr. van der Kemp, who gave his life for my safety on the day of liberation, 5th of May 1945.
Jack Miles
JACK MILES is currently Mellon Visiting Professor of Humanities at the California Institute of Technology. His book God: A Biography won a Pulitzer Prize in 1996.
Between religious absolutism and irreligious nihilism stands liberal religion. Naturally, some regard the practice of liberal religion as a milk-and-water concoction compared with the tub-thumping religion of old. And the secular types might find it easier to reject out of hand the old superstitions rather than sit down with a pastor who has a Ph.D. in theology and wants to argue religion. But some want exactly that.
David Tracy, a Catholic theologian at the University of Chicago, has a wonderful phrase describing in a few words the latest stage in our religious evolution: "After enchantment yields to disenchantment," he says, "disenchantment yields to the disenchantment with disenchantment."
In the world that has experienced modernity, some form of liberal religion as an antidote to the disenchantment with disenchantment is where we are headed at the next stage—a religion that doesn't deny the mind while making it possible to recover that sense of awe and ethical obligation that, together, make religion what it is.
I think the day is over when what emerges from one part of the planet can be a religious answer for the whole world.
I would rather expect that all the religious traditions of the world will go into a cultural meat grinder and, after the experience of nihilism has exhausted the spirit, will each manage its own kind of recovery. In our shrinking world, though, these recoveries will influence one another.
The prospects of mutual influence are fascinating to contemplate. Historical religions of protest and prophecy have flowed from Jerusalem, while religions of acceptance and wisdom have flowed from India. Buddhism is the missionary form of Hinduism, Christianity the missionary form of Judaism. The Western way has been not to accept this world and make peace with it, but to change it and make it better. The Eastern view has been to accept the universe as unchangeable, as given. How will all this mesh in one world where we are all rubbing elbows?
In any event, there is no doubt in my mind that a large-scale recovery is under way. Keiji Nishitani wrote this opening line in his book Religion and Nothingness: "Man says of religion, 'What good is it?' And religion says to man, 'What good are you?'"
When we ask ourselves the question, as many do today, "What good are we?" we are already in a religious moment. We have already left our confident secularism behind. And, I think, also left behind will be both the naive monotheism and naive polytheism of earlier religious traditions. As I have written in my book God: A Biography, the early "drafts" of the Bible offer the image of God that we still find the most powerful. The greatest step any writer makes is the first draft, going from nothing to something. But I also tried to say that God is an evolving character, shaped in dialogue with Himself and His creation.
In this sense, religion is an open-ended enterprise, a continuing dialogue. I have been very influenced by Clifford Geertz, who says that what creates functioning religion is the reflexive relationship it typically establishes between metaphysics and ethics: that is, between the most basic questions of how the world is put together—the question of origins—and how we should conduct ourselves in the world. We act as we do because that is how the world is, and vice versa.
Much social reform proceeds by destroying this kind of relationship, I realize, exposing some presumptively "natural" attitude or behavior as a mere social construct, breaking the very link whose forging forges religion. And much of that destruction is a necessary purification. Still, the assertion that no benign link between fact and value, between nature and conduct, can ever be forged strikes me as gratuitous, an unearned despair or, worse, just a way of ducking the real human assignment. My refusal to despair of such a link is what makes me, secular as I am in so many superficial ways, still a religious man.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from What Does It Mean to Be Human by Frederick Franck, Janis Roze, Richard Connolly. Copyright © 2000 Circumstantial Productions. Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Press.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Title Page,Prologue,
Rhena Schweitzer Miller,
Tenzin Gyatso, the Fourteenth Dalai Lama,
Rabbi Avraham Soetendorf,
Jack Miles,
Elie Wiesel,
Yehudi Menuhin,
Mary Evelyn Tucker,
Oscar Arias,
Facundo Cabral,
Dorothea Sölle,
Thomas Berry,
José Muñoz,
C. Richard Chapman,
Nancy Willard,
Joseph Rotblat,
Charlie Musselwhite,
Václav Havel,
Richard Connolly,
Daniel Martin,
Raimon Panikkar,
Ram Dass,
Donella Meadows,
Seyyed Hossein Nasr,
Gary MacEoin,
Willis Harman,
Juliet Hollister,
Mother Teresa,
Mary Palmer Smith,
Georg Feuerstein,
Carman Moore,
Huston Smith,
Amanda Bernal-Carlo,
Monsignor William Linder,
Alexander Eliot,
James Parks Morton,
Leonard Marks,
Nancy Jack Todd,
Patrick Clarke,
Arno Gruen,
Robert Aitken,
Anne E. Goldfeld,
James Finn Cotter,
Gillian Kean,
Catharina Halkes,
Dean Frantz,
Cornel West,
Joan Chittister,
Rupert Sheldrake,
Janis Roze,
Willem A. M. Alting von Geusau,
Chungliang Al Huang,
Jacques Langlais,
Ludek Broz,
Pedro Aznar,
Satish Kumar,
Joanna Macy,
Stephen Hoe Snyder,
Naomi Shihab Nye,
John Grim,
Arn Chorn-Pond,
James M. Mboje,
Lukas van Witsen Franck,
Richard Kiley,
Harry M. Buck,
Virginia Ramey Mollenkott,
Judith Thompson,
Catherine de Vinck,
James Heisig,
Leonardo Lazarte,
Rustum Roy,
Tomin Harada,
Annelie Keil,
Arthur Frank,
Thomas Bezanson,
Anne Wilson Schaef,
Ervin Laszlo,
James Earl Jones,
Mel King,
Ralph White,
Ramón Pascuel Muñoz Soler,
Daniel Berrigan,
Denizé Lauture,
Wilma Mankiller,
Catherine Bernier,
Constance Carlough,
David Krieger,
Ruth Slickman,
Akihisa Kondo,
Archbishop Desmond Tutu,
Ashis Nandy,
Harvey Cox,
Frederick Franck,
Editors' Note,
Notes,
Copyright Page,