I wish to share a story with you from the Congo, from the 1950's.
In 1953, the German physician Dr. Albert Schweitzer was being interviewed by Time magazine after being awarded the Noble prize for peace. Dr. Schweitzer had dedicated his entire working life to setting up a hospital and delivering lifesaving medicine to the peoples of the Congo in Africa.
The interviewer posed a question, ‘your arrival, Doctor, must have put the local witch doctors out of business’.
The old doctor sat forward and paused for a moment before standing and gesturing for the interviewer to follow him. Both men walked across the hospital floor and into the heat of the spring African day. They walked across the dirt road, which led them to a grassier trail up an embankment that eventually led to the top of a raise clearing.
Looking down the other side, the men could see a local village healer with a row of some 50 villagers in line to see him.
The men watched as the shaman would meet each person. The first person he instructed to lie down on the ground, as he would massage and perform bodywork on her, the next he pointed to the nearby trees and plants, the next villager he stood still with for some time, as if listening, and then the next the shaman turned around and pointed up at the hill to where the old doctor stood.
Doctor Schweitzer turned to the interviewer and said, some people need the power of touch, others the medicine of plants, others require the power of listening and then there are those who need what I have to offer.
And that is how it is, some clients will come to you for bodywork, others for plants, others will come to talk so that they can feel heard and for a few the best path forward is for a referral onwards.
Dr. Schweitzer is celebrated as the doctor who built an ‘African hospital for the African people’. He understood that if allopathic medicine was to be accepted by the native people it had to be integrated in a way that respected the peoples traditions rather than imposing some ideals.
In 1952 Dr. Schweitzer was awarded the noble peace prize for his philosophy that he coined ‘reverence for life’. His ‘Tao’ of living.
It was not his work in Africa that he was rewarded for but the way that he carried it out.
He transformed his work and life into his path of devotion and of meaning and consequently his great joy. An example for others to follow.
With a deep wish for the continued unfolding of joy inservice and self discovery.
Le Beannachtaí,
David
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