I think lots of folks didn’t know that he had only a short time left, because Senator Kennedy kept his Senate seat, and people spoke as if he would return at some point. Now we all know that Senator Kennedy’s time in the Senate is through, and as we say in church, he rests from his labors.
Senator Kennedy embodied great contradictions. It puzzles me how someone with so great a capacity for soaring rhetoric and effective legislation could fail to translate the ideals represented in public to his private life. Authoring ground-breaking legislation on behalf of women, Senator Kennedy was a notorious womanizer. As an advocate of public health, he failed for many years of his life to care for his own health.
This puzzles me, that is, until I take a good look at myself, and see all the small and large ways in which I betray my own ideals. I suppose it’s a part of being human, to say one thing and do another; to wish and strive for something higher while sabotaging the efforts to attain the higher way.
That is why I am grateful for God’s grace. Grace, God’s unmerited favor, is God’s way of giving us another chance to try. And, by trying again and again, we get a bit further along the road toward that place where our ideals and our actions match.
Rest in Peace, Senator Kennedy. And to the rest of us, for now, Rest in Grace.
