NY Times: How Ben Sasse Is Living Now That He Is Dying

New York Times, How Ben Sasse Is Living Now That He Is Dying:

How would you live if you knew when you were going to die?

When Ben Sasse announced last December that he had been diagnosed with Stage 4 pancreatic cancer, he called it a death sentence, but he noted that he’d had one before the cancer too. We all do.

Sasse served the state of Nebraska in the U.S. Senate for eight years as a high-minded and, by his own account, sometimes ineffectual conservative. Then he quit politics to become the president of the University of Florida, pursuing a different model of civic reform.

Now he’s facing mortality.

For Sasse, the advance of his cancer has brought clarity, sharpening his focus on his wife and three children, and the God whom he expects to shortly meet.

At the same time, he’s doing a lot of talking. He’s running his own podcast, titled “Not Dead Yet,” and he’s doing interviews like this one about what life is like on the threshold of the undiscovered country. …

Ross Douthat: [T]ell me how you’re thinking about your relationship to [your kids] and your own family life in the shadow of death. … For the listener or viewer who … doesn’t believe in God and finds your cosmic optimism admirable but maybe thinks that you’re deluding yourself on the brink of actual finitude, what would you say to that person.

Ben Sasse: Let’s read the Book of Romans together. In Romans 1, where Paul’s essentially laying out a catechetical argument for the structure of Christianity against a Jewish messianic hopeful backdrop, he says there are lots of intellectual arguments you can make against God, but you have to start with a fundamental question about what do you do with this moral issue of our own conscience?

And does the individual in your hypothetical really start with the claim that things are right in your soul? Because I can’t relate to that. Things are not right in my soul.

My soul thinks Ben should be God, and I want that to die. Cancer sucks. But I’m pretty grateful that cancer is a stake against my delusional self-idolatry.

Douthat: Do you think you’re ready to die? Do you feel ready?

Sasse: I don’t feel ready. But to whom would I go? I have confidence that when Jesus says to the disciples he didn’t want to be identified as the Messiah yet, keep these crowds away, don’t tell about the water-into-wine miracle at the feast — how amazing is it that Jesus’ first miracle is a big-ass party? Let’s drink more together.

But he says: You can’t keep the children from me. And we’re told that we get to approach the Almighty, we get to approach the divine and call him Daddy, Abba, Father? That’s pretty glorious. And I know that that’s what I need.

Douthat: Ben. [Voice breaks.] Sorry.

Sasse: Happy to get him, to get him to open up a can of pansy ass.

Douthat: Yeah, you got me at the end. Got me. Ben Sasse, thank you for joining me.

Sasse: Thanks for having me.