(Photo at Spence Publishing’s Web site)
Richard John Neuhaus passed away earlier this month, a victim of cancer. Obituaries may be found here and here and here. Most of the commentary focuses on Neuhaus’ background in civil rights work and his shift toward the Right through the Eighties. His best-known book, “The Naked Public Square,” argued that secularism was aggressively, and wrongly, pushing religious thought out of public life.
Apart from his theological and social-political writings, Neuhaus issued a wonderful, multi-page column of scattered observation every month in First Things, entitled “The Public Square.” (For a collection of them, see here and here.) . The New York Times obituary remarks, “In First Things, the journal he founded, he maintained a column of caustic commentary on political, social and religious developments until he fell ill last year.” But a quick glance through any issue of First Things shows a richer and deeper vein than “caustic commentary” suggests. Some entries are caustic, some sober, some wry, and some sad.
Here, in full, is his very last entry, in the February 2009 issue:
As of this writing, I am contending with a cancer, presently of unknown origin. I am, I am given to believe, under the expert medical care of the Sloan-Kettering clinic here in New York. I am grateful beyond measure for your prayers storming the gates of heaven. Be assured that I neither fear to die nor refuse to live. If it is to die, all that has been is but a slight intimation of what is to be. If it is to live, there is much that I hope to do in the interim. After the last round with cancer 15 years ago, I wrote a little book, As I Lay Dying (titled after William Faulkner after John Donne), in which I said much of what I had to say about the package deal that is mortality. I did not know that I had so much more to learn. And yes, the question has occurred to me that, if I have but a little time to live, should I be spending it writing this column. I have heard it attributed to figures as various as Brother Lawrence and Martin Luther — when asked what they would do if they knew they were going to die tomorrow, they answered that they would plant a tree and say their prayers. (Luther is supposed to have added that he would quaff his favored beer.) Maybe I have, at least metaphorically, planted a few trees, and certainly I am saying my prayers. Who knew that at this point in life I would be understanding, as if for the first time, the words of Paul, ‘When I am weak, then I am strong’? This is not a farewell. Please God, we will be pondering together the follies and splendors of the Church and the world for years to come. But maybe not. In any event, when there is an unidentified agent in your body aggressively attacking the good things your body is intended to do, it does concentrate the mind. The entirety of our prayer is ‘Your will be done’ — not as a note of resignation but of desire beyond expression. To that end, I commend myself to your intercession, and that of all the saints and angels who accompany us each step through time toward home.
