Rep. Ben Sasse’s cancer diagnosis exposes our age of self-worship
by Ray Watford · The Washington TimesOPINION:
“My soul thinks Ben should be God.”
That’s what former Rep. Ben Sasse said in a recent conversation about faith and mortality, as he spoke openly about his terminal pancreatic cancer.
At 75, hearing a man talk that honestly about dying has forced me to confront something I can no longer comfortably postpone: my own mortality. The clock starts moving faster as you age. You feel it.
He later added, “Cancer sucks, but I’m pretty grateful that cancer is a stake against my delusional self-idolatry.”
It was blunt. It was honest. And the older I get, the more I think Mr. Sasse identified something essential about the human condition: the quiet, stubborn voice inside each of us that still believes we should stand at the center of the universe.
Modern culture trains us to build the self like a monument. We curate identities online, defend our opinions like territory and organize our lives around personal fulfillment. The self becomes the sun and everything else — relationships, communities, even institutions — is expected to orbit around it.
We are told we are the masters of our own destiny, the authors of our own truth and the center of the frame.
But older religious traditions warned about exactly this trap long before social media existed. The Apostle Paul wrote about pride and self-deception. Centuries later, Augustine described the human heart as incurvatus in se — curved inward on itself.
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Modern psychology now describes many of the same tendencies through the language of narcissism, anxiety and isolation.
When you become your own god, the burden of sustaining meaning falls entirely on your shoulders. It is an exhausting way to live.
I spent decades in the newspaper business. One lesson the industry teaches quickly is how temporary human importance really is. Headlines that feel Earth-shattering at midnight are forgotten almost as quickly as they arrive.
You learn very quickly that time does not pause for anyone’s self-importance.
Over a lifetime, I have also noticed that if we do not learn humility willingly, reality eventually teaches it for us. Serious illness, addiction, grief, catastrophic failure — suffering has a way of stripping illusions down to the bone. People who endure those experiences often emerge speaking a different language.
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Sometimes they’re quieter. Sometimes humbler. Almost always, they are more compassionate.
That is part of what struck me about Mr. Sasse’s remarks. He wasn’t speaking like a politician protecting an image or a public figure curating a brand. He sounded like a man confronting the collapse of the illusion that he controlled his own life.
Yet modern life rewards the opposite. Social media amplifies certainty, outrage, vanity and performance. Humility struggles to survive in a culture built around attention. The modern self is expected not merely to exist, but to constantly advertise itself.
Deep down, though, most people eventually discover the same truth: The self alone is simply not large enough to sustain a meaningful life.
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The older religious traditions understood this deeply. Christianity speaks of surrender and grace. Aging, if we allow it, teaches its own secular version of the same lesson. The body slows. Ambitions narrow. The illusion of total self-sufficiency begins to crack.
I do not pretend to possess absolute theological certainty. I still wrestle with doubt and the universe remains a profound mystery to me. But I have come to believe that many of our modern frustrations grow from the same ancient illusion that the self is large enough to bear the full weight of meaning.
It isn’t. It never was.
Faith and age seem to agree on at least this much: The moment we stop demanding the center of the stage (as Mr. Sasse has been forced to do in the most public and painful way), we finally make room for something larger than ourselves.
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• Ray Watford is a retired newspaper production director.