“The worst thing is not the sorrow or the loss or the heartbreak. Worse is to be encountered by death and not to be changed by the encounter. There are pills we can take to get through the experience, but the danger is that we then do not go through the experience but around it.” –Richard John Neuhaus, “Born Toward Dying,” in The Best Spiritual Writing 2000, edited by Philip Zaleski (2000)
Maybe it was because I found this essay while searching in the same volume for another poem by John Updike, or maybe it was because so many loved ones and friends recently have been either dying or experiencing debilitating illnesses. But the essay in which I found the above quote from Richard John Neuhaus, who died on January 8, hit me with particular force.
For more than four decades, Fr. Neuhaus engaged passionately in this nation’s political-religious dialogue. Beginning his career as a Lutheran minister who was among the civil-rights marchers at Selma, he later converted to Roman Catholicism and outraged many of his former colleagues by denouncing abortion as fervently as he once had segregation and voting-rights abuses.
Neuhaus did not see his former and current stances as contradictory, and neither do I—though I take issue with a number of aspects of his thought--quite a few, actually--in his later years, including, but hardly limited to, his question, “Is Mormonism Christian?” (His answer: no, though Mormons remain entitled to “respect for their human dignity, protection of their religious freedom, readiness for friendship, openness to honest dialogue, and an eagerness to join hands in social and cultural tasks that advance the common good.” I can just picture their response after reading the rest of the piece—“Thanks a lot, Father.”)
The column that Fr. Neuhaus wrote for the journal he founded, First Things, was called “The Naked Public Square,” taking its name from a 1984 book of his. The column was, in effect, a print prototype for a religion blog, in which he advanced the point that secularism drives the religiously minded out of the national political debate at its own peril.
A couple of years ago, I was startled to read that this priest, so often associated with neo-conservatism, had been preaching at the 5 pm Mass on Sundays at my alma mater, Columbia University. From this fascinating article on the nature of his intellectual thought, evidently written a few years ago, I discovered that Fr. Neuhaus was not assigned full-time to the campus, but rather came up there from his regular parish down by 14th Street to preach on Sunday.
An article from Commonweal Magazine from a couple of years ago indicated that the arrangements with Fr. Neuhaus resulted from a desire by Edward Cardinal Egan for a more conservative ministry on the campus. I’m sure that the appointment probably went over like a lead balloon with a large portion of the Catholic community on Morningside Heights. During my time at the school, in the late Seventies and early Eighties, Fr. Neuhaus’ orthodoxy would not have been widely embraced by a Catholic student body and faculty that, like the rest of the school, tended to be overwhelmingly liberal in thought.
I hope that Fr. Neuhaus and the students to whom he preached didn’t talk past each other. An honorable religious tradition, extending from Jeremiah to the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., consists in telling people what they’d rather not hear. The human temptation is to find safety in numbers.
When people begin to wander off the ideological reservation, whether in religion or politics—but especially where the two realms intersect—it’s frightening to find oneself out there alone. What do you do then—softpedal concerns that might outrage people who’ve meant much to you for a long time, or embrace everyone who embraces you, even though you might have serious qualms about their positions or character?
Neither choice, it seems to me, is particularly fruitful. It doesn’t really leave you open to thoughts that demand to be heard and acknowledged. Dialogue within religions as well as between religions need to be conducted in tones of respect as much as challenge.
In that spirit, I urge you to find Fr. Neuhaus’ essay “Born Toward Dying” and read it. What begins as an objective if tough-minded cultural survey of “going through the experience” of death has been earned, one discovers in the grueling autobiographical part of the piece, under the most grueling of circumstances: Fr. Neuhaus had his own near-death experience starting in 1993. No matter what your feelings about his religious orthodoxy or political stances, I think you’ll find his reflections in this case not just erudite and provocative, as with so much of his other work, but moving and profound.
Fr. Neuhaus’ cancer had been in remission before his final, fatal encounter a few weeks ago. How was he changed by his initial battle with death? What did he learn? Hopefully that, at the end, we are not defined before God by labels—liberal or conservative, Catholic or non-Catholic, etc.—but that, no matter what your station in life, as the poet Thomas Gray once put it, “The paths of glory lead but to the grave.”
Even in death, Fr. Neuhaus will be contributing to the spirited religious discussion in this country with a posthumously published book, American Babylon: Notes of a Christian Exile, which is supposed to discuss the religious/spiritual aspects of American democracy.
Requiescat in pacem, Fr. Neuhaus.
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