Let your dreams rise and fly

While he was still at college, Albert Schweitzer’s classmates would often ask him, “however do you manage to do so much?” The theologian-turned-musician , who won the Nobel Peace Prize for medical work in Africa, usually laughed or would try to shrug off such questions. But when they persisted, Schweitzer would show a French poem which he had framed and hung up above his work table:

“Higher, ever higher,/ Let thy dreams and wishes rise,/ Let them mount like flame of fire,/ Upwards to the skies./ Higher , ever higher,/And when thy heaven is overcast,/ May thy star of faith aspire/ Till all is bright at last.”
For more than sixty years this extract was Schweitzer's inspiration.

It is still to be found, faded, above his writing-desk in Gunsbach . After graduation, Schweitzer published one of the most famous theological texts of our times called The Quest of the Historical Jesus. In this he defined Jesus as an ultimately tragic figure whose apocalyptic consciousness impelled him to his death.

He also believed that Jesus had died mistaken and forsaken . This conclusion drove him from the study of theology to the work of practical love. He wrote of this period in his life: “I wanted to be a doctor that I might be able to work without having to talk. For years I had been giving myself out in words...this new form of activity I could not represent to myself as being talking about the religion of love, but only as an actual putting it into practice.”

He was 30 when he answered the Evangelist Missions Society’s call for a medical doctor. The selection committee baulked at his incorrect’ Lutheran theology . Although he could easily have obtained a place in a German Evangelical mission, Schweitzer wished to follow the original call of serving humanity despite the doctrinal difficulties.

So amid a hail of protests from his friends, family and colleagues , the Alsatian-born theologian resigned his post and reentered the university as a student of a punishing seven-year course towards the degree of a doctorate in medicine, a subject in which he had little knowledge or previous aptitude.

He did this because he wanted to spread the Gospel by the example of the Christian labour of healing, rather than through the verbal process of preaching. He ardently believed that this ‘service without sound’ would be acceptable in any branch of Christian teaching. Walk the talk.