I have to admit, I rarely feel much emotion when I see an obituary for someone I didn’t know. Even people I liked. When I read that Christopher Plummer had died, for instance, I didn't feel sadness that a 91-year-old actor had passed away peacefully. I thought about the movies he'd been in and that I'd liked. An obituary is an opportunity to reflect on someone's life.
So I can’t say I felt sad when I heard that Rush Limbaugh had died, but did I feel anything else?
Rush Limbaugh was a man known for hateful and vitriolic comments, the kind that diminish people. Limbaugh caused immense pain to gay people, ruptures within families, much of the coarsening of America’s discourse.
His leaving the world does not undo any of that damage. Only we can decide whether his legacy is a less kind world.
In the past several years I have seen a lot of evaluating of the souls of other people, most notably when they die. There was a certain amount of “dancing on the grave” when Osama bin Laden was killed, but I also saw it for a number of public figures. Margaret Thatcher. Antonin Scalia. George Bush. John McCain. Each of these people did things that other people found revolting, but where does it stop?
I see something very corrosive happening in our righteousness. Left or right, we are all human and we could be wrong.
The way we react to human beings’ suffering says more about us than it says about them. In the Christian tradition, we are responsible for evaluating the state of our own souls.
That is the moral place reached by people I admire most, in my own and in other traditions. Is that where I am? Not by any stretch, and nor am I to judge anyone else for not being there.
But what if each of us is to be judged by the best thing we have ever done or said, rather than the worst?
What if we are to be judged by the repentance of our hearts?
We don’t know these things. For myself, I can only hope.
