MAN DIMINISHED BY HIS OWN CREATION
Maxie Dunnam
What is man, that thou art mindful of him?
And the son of man, that thou visiteth him?
For thou hast made him but little lower than God,
And crownest him with glory and honor.
Thou makest him to have dominion over
the works of thy hands. (Ps. 8:46)
“Glass, Concrete, and Man” this was the caption beneath a picture in Dixie magazine. The picture was of the New Orleans’ new Federal Building. It was taken from a low vantage point where one looked up on a maze of stories, a complex of glass and concrete. On one of the stories a workman could be seen. The text of the picture said: “Almost lost in a massive latticework of glass and concrete, a solitary, white capped workman polishes metal facing that adorns wings projecting from the floors of New Orleans’ Federal Building.”
It’s true, isn’t it? Man is often diminished by his own creations.
Perhaps it was providential that at the same time I saw this picture I was reading Dr. Schweitzer of Lambaréné, by Norman Cousins.
My hopes for man are sometimes shattered. I am sometimes disillusioned with man’s seemingly limited possibilities. But then I contemplate the life of a Schweitzer, and I regain a true perspective. Man’s creations are not the important things; man is. The realization of this is what keeps Schweitzer going. A few days before Cousins visited Schweitzer in Lambarene and wrote his book, Schweitzer shared an experience which points this out.
Schweitzer received word from a professional colleague in France about an examination paper turned in by a nineteen-year-old boy. The question that had been put was: “How would you define the best hope for the culture of Western Europe?” The answer given by the student was: “It is not in any part of Europe. It is in a small African village, and it can be identified with an eighty-two-year-old mạn.”
Dr. Schweitzer paused. He held in his hand the letter that told of the student’s conception of his role in the modern world. He was profoundly moved.
“In the morning,” he said, “when the sun is up and I hear the cries of the Hospital, I do not think of these lofty ideas. But at a moment like this, when the Hospital is asleep, it means much to me that the student should believe these things, whether they are true or not.”
Well, they are true, not because Albert Schweitzer is Albert Schweitzer, but because he is a man who has not been diminished by the complexities of his time. He has been willing to make the ultimate sacrifice for a moral principle. As Cousins comments:
“The tragedy of life is in what dies inside a man while he lives—the death of genuine feeling, the death of inspired response, the death of the awareness that makes it possible to feel the pain or the glory of other men in oneself.”
Schweitzer has proved that although a man may have no jurisdiction over the fact of his existence, he can hold supreme command over the meaning of existence for him. Thus, no man need fear death; he need fear only that he may die without having known his greatest power – the power of his free will to give his life for others.
We can’t be Schweitzers. But we can be men, whole men. Men who have not been diminished by our creations, but men filled with individual purpose, individual inspiration, individual integrity, and individual moral fortitude.