“When a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.” This adage from the 18th century literary figure Samuel Johnson was referenced by former U.S. Senator Ben Sasse in a recent interview about his experience of living while dying from metastatic pancreatic cancer. Sasse received his diagnosis this past December and was given only a few months to live. In the interview, he talks about his friend Tim Keller, a well-known Presbyterian minister in New York City, who died of the same disease in 2023. During his illness, Keller would tell him, “I hate this. But I would never want to go back to the prayer life I had before pancreatic cancer.” Sasse says he didn’t understand what Keller was getting at until he found himself in terrible pain prior to his own cancer diagnosis. Tumors had grown around his spine, and the only thing that gave him relief were hot showers, which he found he had to take 5-6 times at night. The pain, he said, “definitely shattered idols really fast.” These idols consisted of “lots of dumb stuff that I cared too much about, and I was too self-reliant about,” which in his suffering, “seemed really pointless.”
Another quote that Sasse has been thinking about comes from the actress Joan Collins, who once said: “The problem with beauty is that it’s like being born rich and getting poorer.” Sasse considers it “a profound way to think about our mortality. If your identity is in your beauty and you’re a decaying flower, the flower fades.” As one who spent much of his life as an educator and in public service, he reflects on the things that he prioritized, saying: “All the things that I used to cling to right now seem really, really trivial because they’re actually really trivial. They could be important ways to love your neighbor. But if you make them an idol [they’re] not a mixed good but an unadulterated bad.” With the end of his life looming, Sasse is grateful for his Christian faith and the grace to rely on the enduring promises of Christ. He is learning detachment from the grand plans he may have had for himself and for his children, and to trust more in God’s timing. He also has greater appreciation for the wisdom of the Lord’s commandment regarding the use of the gift of time. “One of the things that has become clear to me, and which I tell my kids a lot, is [how much] I wish I took the Lord’s Day more seriously more of my life. Because it’s a really good antidote to all those idolatries. God smashing all those idols for us is a blessing.”
In the midst of the daily grind, it’s easy to forget how brief our lives are. Ben Sasse seems to want to spend his remaining days reminding people and encouraging us to take stock. How are we ordering our lives? How much of what we prioritize is actually trivial? And how much of what we trivialize should actually be a priority? For Sasse, during those agonizing nocturnal showers he discovered himself crying out: “Lord, come quickly,” and meaning it. He thinks we should be organizing our lives in such a way that in every moment we can say such a prayer and mean it too.
posted 3/21/26
The Parish of St. Cecilia-St. Gabriel 