‘To want what I have, to take what I’m given with grace … for this, I pray.’
— ‘For My Wedding,’ Don Henley
America is a nation of faith. So it is often said.
In
faith, a baker refuses to bake a cake for a gay couple’s wedding. In
faith, a minister prays for the president to die. In faith, terrorists
plant bombs at the finish line of a marathon. In faith, mosques are
vandalized, shot at and burned. In faith, a televangelist asks his
followers to buy him a $65 million private jet.
And no one is even surprised anymore.
In
America, what we call faith is often loud, often exclusionary,
sometimes violent and too frequently enamored of shiny, expensive
things. In faith, ill-tempered people mob the shopping malls every year
at Christmas to have fistfights and gunfights over hot toys and highend
electronics.
You did not hear much about faith last
week when Jimmy Carter held a news conference to reveal that he has
four spots of cancer on his brain. The 39th president made only a few
references to it in the nearly 40 minutes he spoke, and they were all in
response to reporter’s questions. Yet, you would be hard-pressed to
find a more compelling statement of belief in things not seen.
Unsentimental, poised and lit from within by an amazing grace, Carter
discussed the fight now looming ahead of him, the radiation treatments
he will undergo, the need to finally cut back on his whirlwind schedule.
He
smiled often. “I’m perfectly at ease with whatever comes,” he said, in
such a way that you believed him without question. And it was impossible
to feel sorry for him.
Partially, that’s because
we all die and if — still only an if — cancer is what takes James Earl
Carter Jr. away, well, there are worse things than to go having reached
90 years of age, having been president of the United States, having been
married to the love of your life for almost seven decades, having sired
a large and sprawling family and having done significant work toward
the eradication of disease and the spreading of democracy in the
developing world.
But here’s the other reason it
was impossible to feel sorry for him. Feeling sorry would have felt like
an insult, a denial of the virtues he showed and the faith he didn’t
need to speak because it was just … there.
For all
its loudness, all its exclusion, violence and ubiquity, the faith that
is modeled in the public square is often not particularly affecting. It
is hard to imagine someone looking on it from outside and musing to
herself, “I’d like to have some of that.” What Carter showed the world,
though, was different. Who would not want to be able to face the unknown
with such perfect equanimity?
Carter presented an
image of faith we don’t see nearly as often as we should. Which is sad,
because it is also the image truest to what faith is supposed to be —
not a magic lamp you rub in hopes of a private jet, not a license for
our worse impulses, but, rather, an act of surrender to a force greater
than self, a way of being centered enough to tell whatever bleak thing
comes your way, “So be it.” Even fearsome death itself: “So be it.”
The
heat and hubris of human life are such that that state is difficult to
conceive, much less to reach. Our lives are defined by wanting and by
lack — more money, new car, new love — and by the ceaseless hustle to
fill empty spaces within. Media and advertising conspire to make you
feel ever incomplete. So it is hard to feel whole within yourself, at
peace with what is, whatever that turns out to be.
But who, gazing upon the former president, can doubt the result is worth the effort?
In
faith, terrorists kill the innocent. In faith, televangelists swindle
the gullible. In faith, so many of us hate, exclude, hurt, curse and
destroy. And in faith, last week, Jimmy Carter told the world he has
cancer in his brain.
And smiled as he spoke.
