Ben Sasse's Golgotha

Talking About His 'Calling To Die' With Ross Douthat

Ross Douthat told me after he interviewed Ben Sasse, the former GOP senator who is dying of cancer, that Sasse’s face looks like Jim Caviezel’s at the end of The Passion Of The Christ — this, based on how bloodied it is, a side effect of a treatment he’s on. Still, that didn’t prepare me for the actual interview, which just dropped. Ross said it moved him immensely, doing the interview, and that Sasse’s Christian witness is extraordinary — his joy and hope through the agony of his dying.

I said I wasn’t going to publish on Orthodox Good Friday, so I’m writing this on Thursday. There is nothing I could possibly write that would top the testimony that Christian man, heroic in his suffering, says in the interview. Excerpts:

Sasse: I did not decide to die in public. I obviously ended up with a calling to die. In mid-December I got a three- to four-month life expectancy, and I’m at Day 99 or something since then, and I’m doing a heck of a lot better than I was doing at Christmas.

But even at three to four months left to live, you have to redeem the time. There’s only so many bits of unsolicited advice I can give my children. So, you journalists want to talk, and if you don’t have anybody better, I’m your man. I’ll be your huckleberry.

More:

So, I have pancreatic cancer — Stage 4, already metastasized. They told me right away on Day 1, “This is not operable, you’re way post-surgical.”

They told me over the course of the next couple of days that I already have five forms of cancer: lymphoma, vascular, lung cancer, bad liver cancer and pancreatic, where it originated. So, it was pretty clear that we’re dealing with a short number of months left to live.

After the cancer talk, Douthat turns his questioning to politics. I was amazed by what Sasse had to say about how a hundred years from now, nobody will be talking about the politics of this era. They will be talking about how smartphones changed us. Funny, but that is a big theme of the concluding chapter of my Weimar book. I hadn’t thought that it would be when I started out, but it’s clear to me now that what the Great War and economic calamity was to pre-Nazi Germany, technology is to whatever is going to happen to us in the not-too-distant future.

Not unrelated, Sasse on his time in the Senate:

Sasse: … It did start a little bit pre-Trump because I got elected in 2014, took office in 2015, and by the end of 2015, I was a little bit in trouble with my party at home for not hating Democrats enough. And I was like, “But I don’t. There are 330 million Americans”

Douthat: What was a concrete example of that that the party was pissed about?

Sasse: That I didn’t spend time going on the angriest tribal media channels to say that Obama wasn’t born in the U.S. The conspiracy theory versions of stuff became a really important marker for people to say, “I really dislike those other people.”

What I care about is the Ronald Reagan impulse to say, “Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction,” and that you don’t pass it along in the bloodstream, you pass it along because we teach it — and we haven’t been teaching it since sometime between the late ’60s and the early ’80s.

Our civics experience is in collapse. At this point, I would talk about what was happening on college campuses — much worse in the decade since‚ but at that point, there was some polling that showed just over 35 percent of American college kids thought the First Amendment was dangerous because you might use your freedom of speech to say something that hurt somebody else’s feelings.

The whole dang point of America, the point of America is that we lay down our weapons outside the tent, and you go into the tent and you say: Speech cannot be violence, and violence is not a form of speech.

What we believe here is that everybody is created in the image of God. They have universal rights.

We need to celebrate the American civic tradition together, and we weren’t doing any of that, but I was in trouble with some of my voters for not being angry enough about something Barack Obama had just done.

Yeah. The algorithm lives on hate, and teaching us to hate. All of us. I’m not going to quote him any more on all this, because I really want you to read the interview — or better, watch it, because a man suffering like he’s suffering, with no hope of survival, does not have the right to be so joyful. But he is. And he tells you why:

Sasse: I got my diagnosis in mid-December.

Similar to when you were going through your health episodes, I was incredibly blessed to be quickly at peace. I kept hearing the Pauline phrase “To live as Christ, to die is gain.”

Death is terrible. We should never sugarcoat it. It is not how things are meant to be. But it is great that death can be called the final enemy. It’s an enemy, but it’s a final enemy, and there will then be no more tears.

I believe in the Resurrection, and I believe in a restoration of this world. So, I did not feel great fear about my death. I didn’t want the pain I was going through. I didn’t want to be a pansy ass in the final moments.

More:

We’re all on the clock, and I wanted to have prioritized better. Whether I really only have three or four months left, or if I get nine to 12 months left, I want to prioritize better from then.

But in my tradition, in Christianity, the need for daily repentance is just a truth. “I am broken. I leave undone those things which I ought to have done, and I do those things which I ought not to have done and there is no health in us.”

I get to repent every day of both my sins of omission and commission. And yet, at a slightly bigger level, if you’re only going to get three or four months, you really want to get some of your affairs in order.

This is the part that reduced me to tears, literally:

Sasse: … Tim Keller, who I know you knew, who’s in my denomination — a Presbyterian pastor in New York who also died of pancreatic cancer — said: I hate pancreatic cancer. I would never wish it on anyone, but I would never want to go back to a time in my life where I didn’t know the prayer of pancreatic cancer.

Meaning I now, in the midst of this disease, know much more the truth of my finitude than I ever let myself believe in the past. The hubristic nonsense — I believe in God and I’m grateful and blessed, but I can build a storehouse that can be pretty deistically persuasive.

My storehouse can have enough resources that I can operate without a need, but that’s not true. I can’t keep the planets in orbit. I can’t even grow skin on my face.

Gotta admit that I kept crying through the rest of it. I wish I had known this man, Ben Sasse, in real life. Midwesterner to the marrow. Wears his mortality easily. The life advice he gives is golden, but trust me, you need to watch the video to hear it coming out of that bloody, happy face. It is the face of a man who knows his Redeemer.

Here’s a link to the whole thing. Watch it, share it widely. Damn, he would have made a good president. But I guess God had more important things for Ben Sasse to do. Like testify to the goodness of life in the face of an agonizing death.