The early daylight was only just creeping down into the shadows under the trees, but he saw his master's face very clearly, and his hands, too, lying at rest on the ground beside him. He was reminded suddenly of Frodo as he had lain, asleep in the house of Elrond, after his deadly wound. Then as he had kept watch Sam had noticed that at times a light seemed to be shining faintly within; but now the light was even clearer and stronger. Frodo's face was peaceful, the marks of fear and care had left it; but it looked old, old and beautiful, as if the chiselling of the shaping years was now revealed in many fine lines that had before been hidden, though the identity of the face was not changed. Not that Sam Gamgee put it that way to himself. He shook his head, as if finding words useless, and murmured: 'I love him. He's like that, and sometimes it shines through, somehow. But I love him, whether or no.'
~ J. R. R. Tolkien, The Two Towers
When we lost Tim Keller nearly three years ago to pancreatic cancer I likened him to Aragorn. What I meant by that was not simply that Tim was a leader, although he was. I meant to say something about the sort of man he was; his authority was not derived from an office or a title, but from the man's character and wisdom.
Part of the reason I wrote that is because I had watched Tim die. We only met face to face on two occasions—the first after his retirement from Redeemer but prior to his cancer diagnosis and the second during the pandemic less than a year before his death. On the second occasion, what so struck me about him was that he seemed almost bored with his own diagnosis. He didn't want to talk about cancer, though he was reluctantly willing to offer an update if asked. (If asked too often, he might also politely ask you to stop asking or would simply ignore the question.)
Mostly he wanted to know how I was and talk about what we were both reading. Our last in-person visit consisted of walking laps around Roosevelt Island as Tim told me about this new book he had just finished and that I had to read called A World After Liberalism.
Tim was in his early 70s, retired, and dying of cancer and he was staying more up to date on the discourses of the day than I was—a magazine editor in my early 30s whose job was to be up to date on such things. From his reading we turned to other things—the recent work of several journalists we both read and who Tim, of course, had befriended and was praying for. And eventually we came to family and marriage and prayer and children. I think the people he thought about most during those years were his wife Kathy and their sons.
In other words, even in his dying Tim's eyes were turned not inward on himself, but outward onto the world, onto his nation, onto the church, and onto his friends and his family. There was a light that seemed to be with him, in the way Tolkien describes Frodo in the scene quoted above.
To borrow a phrase I heard Leah Sargeant use recently, Tim made a gift of his dying.
When you put it that way, there's something that should stop you in your tracks if you know your Bible: For when Jesus was dying, what was on his mind most? It was the world he was dying to save; it was the cruel men who had just been beating and mocking him, who he then forgave; it was his mother, Mary. If there was something bright and saintly that I saw in Tim in that final meeting, Tim would be quick to correct me and say that what I was seeing was the work of Christ in him. Because of Jesus, Tim went to his death in the same way Jesus did, concerned over the world and wishing to provide final expressions of love, care, and concern for the people he loved. If Tim made a gift of his dying, it was because Jesus did it first.
I thought of that yesterday as I watched two separate interviews with my former Senator Ben Sasse. The first was with the Hoover Institute and mostly covered issues of politics, public life, higher ed, and the other lines of work Sasse has given much of his life to. The other was with Sola Media and, particularly, with Sasse's longtime friends Michael Horton and Dan Bryant. There are two moments in particular worth highlighting for readers, both of which have to do with the way mortality focuses one's attention:
First, there is this passage in his conversation with Peter Robinson, starting around the 44:40 mark:
In particular I want to consider these words from Sasse:
But for the period before I started on the morphine, I was having a rough go of it. The desperation of that pain, the regrets I've had to wrestle through in the time of realizing that I wish I had served my wife and kids better, I wish there were things in their character that were farther along and the stuff that's, you can see that, "Man, that's clunky behavior. You look a lot like your dad."
When you feel those regrets or when you are just bored.... at sleeping 15 or 16 hours a day right now 'cause of all the drugs that I'm on, there's just a lot of time in a hospital bed or convalescing when you get outta the hospital every week. I'm in and outta the hospital every week. I'm just bored outta my mind, which is a question about recognizing the futility of my efforts. Like there was a time when I wasn't as bored 'cause I could delude myself into believing my projects were gonna build a storehouse that lasted. That self-importance, the regrets about love and service and the pain, all those lead you to pray in a different way because you have to acknowledge your finitude. Thhere's just a hell of a lot less room for bullshit. ...
It seems like the first thing humans should do is acknowledge that a lot is broken in this world. The existence of death is surely not the way it's supposed to be. So Jesus weeping, what a gift. The story is amazing. The whole, the whole Lazarus story and his sister's weirdly narcissistic behavior, that's us, right? Like we're dying in the story too. We're many of the characters, but we're definitely that egotistical, self-absorbed, "Jesus, why didn't you do it the way I want you to do it?"
But to our point about short attention spans, first, let's just go back and read that story and a dozen adjacent stories. The Bible is so rich and we spend so little time reading it together. Jesus weeps there, and he knows that he's gonna raise Lazarus five minutes later. So it's an amazing story because he's acknowledging that death is terrible, and yet death doesn't win. The Christian phrase in Christian literature for years has been to call death "the last enemy."
Death is a wicked thief, it's an enemy, but it's pretty great that it's the last enemy. All the stuff that I regret for having been an inadequate husband and son and father and friend and worker, truth teller, all the stuff that I've been weak on, I'm gonna be freed from all of that. Death is the last enemy.
Now from his conversation with Horton and Bryant:
This begins around the 21:30 mark:
I think acknowledging mortality is just fundamental wisdom. You can you can go through a lot of wisdom literature. Ecclesiastes and Job are right there telling us that these bodies are decaying. It is not supposed to be this way and we will have glorified bodies but telling the truth about death is really important.
I don't want to go to my hobby horse about our culture being too always online because in a weird way it's not really about the digital revolution. It's just an intensification via the digital revolution of generational segregation. But we're we're unbelievably blessed to live at a time in human history with some of the most interesting technology ever. But we're also just incredibly stupid people in that most kids are not raised around great-grandparents and they don't see death and they don't have to change diapers.
The course of life is dependency and then a period of independence and then back to dependency. If you delude yourself and think at 23 years old that the glories of your skin and your biceps are going to last, it's a real shame for you that you don't have the opportunity to be around 90 year-olds, maybe 70 year-olds who can explain it, but 90 year-olds who can model a little bit of dignity as they decline. And the stiffer stuff in my mind is not hallmark sentimentality, but honesty about the fact that I'm needy.
And that final remark, I think, takes me back to Tim and back to the Gospel: One of the truest things we can say about our life in this world is that it will end and that it will involve periods of intense neediness and dependence. One application of that truth is that our politics should account for this more than they do right now. But a second and far greater application is that we are needy and we are needy in ways that the world cannot satisfy; only Christ can.
It seems fitting that these two interviews were published on Ash Wednesday, a day when Christians remember the words of Scripture that remind us that we come from dust and we will one day return to dust. But the truth of the Gospel is that God breathed life into that dust once, he will do it again one day, and through union with Christ we can be united with God in that new life, living in the blessed realm on the far side of the defeat of the last enemy. That is the hope we look toward at Easter. That is the hope Tim looked toward. It is the hope Senator Sasse looks toward. That is why his grief is a bright sadness, why he too has made a gift of his dying. That is why his face is peaceful, why "a light seemed to be shining faintly within."