Meditations on an Unusual Inauguration
Not just a pandemic and unrest make this an unusual inauguration. So does Joe Biden.
It’s not an easy thing for the director of The Bernardin Center to acknowledge.
Cardinal Joseph Bernardin was archbishop of Chicago from 1982 until his death in 1996. In those years, Bernardin became one of the most influential religious leaders and the most effective public theologians not just in the Roman Catholic Church, but around the globe. His influence still is felt today, especially because his critics still feel the need to rebut him. When he lost his life to cancer in 1996, he shared his dying and his death very publicly. Beyond his theological and ecclesial influence, he became a figure so beloved through his struggle that the physical evidence can be seen at Chicago’s Holy Name Cathedral today, where his name on a bronze plaque has been worn by the fingers of the Catholics who have touched it.
For most of his life, Bernardin was not really known for his public warmth or for his pastoral sensibility. He had warmth and he was a loving pastor. Mostly, however, he was known as a “bureaucrat’s bureaucrat.” He loved paperwork. He was a consummate church administrator and, being rather shy, he could be uncomfortable with people. All of that changed in the final years of his life. In 1993, he was accused of sexual assault by an accuser who later recanted, apologized publicly, and reconciled privately with Bernardin. After the false allegation came a first cancer diagnosis and surgery, then a second cancer diagnosis and, weeks later, his death on November 14, 1996.
In the weeks before he died, Bernardin produced a remarkable book — The Gift of Peace. In that book, Bernardin wrote —
To close the gap between what I am and what God wants of me, I must empty myself and let Jesus come in and take over. I have prayed to understand his agenda for me. Some things stand out. He wants me focus on the essentials of his message and way of life rather than on the accidentals that needlessly occupy so much of our time and efforts. One can easily distinguish essentials from peripherals in the spiritual life. Essentials ask us to give true witness and to love others more. Nonessentials close us in ourselves.
For Bernardin, the source of these insights was not mysterious. It comes from “emptying myself.” It comes, in a word, from experiences of suffering. Suffering changes us, surely we know. Sometimes we are devastated by suffering. Yet sometimes too, we have a capacity to grow and to discover new strength in ourselves and a deeper understanding of our world through suffering.
Another Catholic in public life, Robert F. Kennedy, described a similar insight on the night in April, 1968 when Martin Luther King, Jr. was murdered. Speaking extemporaneously to a crowd in Indianapolis, Kennedy said —
For those of you who are black and are tempted to be filled with hatred and distrust at the injustice of such an act, against all white people, I can only say that I feel in my own heart the same kind of feeling. I had a member of my family killed, but he was killed by a white man. But we have to make an effort in the United States, we have to make an effort to understand, to go beyond these rather difficult times. My favorite poet was Aeschylus. He wrote: “In our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.”
Biographers tell us how Kennedy had gone into a deep depression after the sudden, shocking murder of his brother, the nation’s first Roman Catholic president. From that experience of suffering, Robert Kennedy seemed to emerge as a changed person. He took a deep interest in poverty and in peacemaking. The man who spoke so eloquently without notes to a bereaved and angry crowd, quelling any violence that might have been seen that night in Indianapolis, was someone whose own experience of suffering had given him a new empathy for the suffering of others. When RFK was assassinated later the same year, few mourned the hectoring young attorney who interrogated Jimmy Hoffa in 1957. Rather, they mourned the compassionate man who had grieved his brother and renewed his commitment to public service. Suffering had brought change.
All this brings me to Joe Biden, who has suffered more in his life than any American president since Franklin Roosevelt, arguably since Lincoln.
The biographical details of the new president’s life are well-known, but they are worth rehearsing if only for emphasis. Elected to the United States Senate in November, 1972 as the body’s youngest member, Biden lost his first wife and infant daughter in an auto accident on December 18, 1972. Their two sons, Beau and Hunter, were injured in the crash and spent months in the hospital recovering. Biden embarked on his national public life weeks later, while his sons were hospitalized and they still were grieving. Perhaps a signal of Biden’s different sort of public service, when he left the Senate in 2008 after thirty-six years in the upper chamber Biden remained one of only three non-millionaires in that body. Beau Biden died from a brain tumor in 2015, bringing yet more suffering into the life of a vice president nearing his term. Dying, Beau urged his father to run for president. In 2016, Joe Biden could not summon the will to do what his son asked him to do. The suffering was too raw and new.
Having buried a wife and two children in his lifetime, Joe Biden understands loss and suffering. Many times throughout the campaign as Biden has talked about looking at “empty chairs at dining room tables all around the country” during the pandemic, it is impossible to forget that we are listening to a man who has done that and knows what it is like. Cynics will scoff. But those who know the spiritual tradition — especially, Catholics — will recognize that Joe Biden is a person who has been transformed by suffering. He is not just another politician.
Certainly, we should not forget that Joe Biden is as flawed as any human being, and certainly he is surrounded by many people who have not been transformed by suffering. There is no cause for hagiography, and I do not mean to write one.
Yet, in this moment when we are wearied and grieved by a long pandemic, angry and divided by violent polarization, it is providential that we will swear in this week a man whose life has been shaped by a kind of suffering that our nation now confronts all together — the kind of suffering that can transform. Political partisans from Bernie Sanders to Lindsey Graham have told us (in honest moments) that they know Joe Biden is the person the United States needs to heal our wounds, to remind us of who we are, and to lead us into the future. Joe Biden’s flaws are real. His readiness and suitability for this moment are uncanny.
Nations suffer as people suffer because a nation is its people. And as people are transformed by suffering, so can a nation be transformed. It has happened before. It can happen again.
It is an unusual presidential inauguration when the routine of the pageantry and the history is overshadowed by the dreary sadness of the moment. It is even more unusual to inaugurate a president of the United States who carries our hopes not so much for policy outcomes or political victories as for a renewal that can transform us and restore us.
Who from his own experience can remind us that change comes from suffering through the awful grace of God.
