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The INVITATION ... an emperience in the Peace Dome |
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The Nobel Peace Prize Laureates you meet in The INVITATION In 1905, Albert Schweitzer, the son of a Lutheran pastor, turned his back on a promising career as a scholar in the fields of religion and music to enter medical school. His destiny became clear a year earlier when, at the age of 29, he read a magazine article about medical missionaries in the Congo. Over the next 60 years, Schweitzer embodied his ideals of a “reverence of life,” founding a hospital in French Equatorial Africa which attracted volunteer doctors and nurses from around the world. When he was presented the Nobel prize it was said of him, “He has shown us that a man’s life and his dream can become one. His work has made the concept of brotherhood a living one.” |
1954
Albert Schweitzer The essential fact which we should acknowledge in our conscience, and which we should have acknowledged a long time ago, is that we are becoming inhuman to the extent that we become supermen. We have learned to tolerate the facts of war: that men are killed en masse -some twenty million in the Second World War - that whole cities and their inhabitants are annihilated by the atomic bomb, that men are turned into living torches by incendiary bombs. We learn of these things from the radio or newspapers and we judge them according to whether they signify success for the group of peoples to which we belong, or for our enemies. When we do admit to ourselves that such acts are the results of inhuman conduct, our admission is accompanied by the thought that the very fact of war itself leaves us no option but to accept them. In resigning ourselves to our fate without a struggle, we are guilty of inhumanity. What really matters is that we should all of us realize that we are guilty of inhumanity. The horror of this realization should shake us out of our lethargy so that we can direct our hopes and our intentions to the coming of an era in which war will have no place. This hope and this will can have but one aim: to attain, through a change in spirit, that superior reason which will dissuade us from misusing the power at our disposal. ©1954 The Nobel Foundation, reprinted with permission |
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Ask how your school or organization can preform The Invitation. Email us at peace@som.org for details |
See the College of Metaphysics performance of
available on dvd |