The Journey that We Took

And the future that we cherish. We were with Jimmy Carter all the way.

“Do not ask for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee.” John Donne speaking of the tradition of ringing a bell to mark the death of a person. In a few brief words, Donne expressed the truth that each person’s death diminishes every other, because they were part of us.

The bell they rang this morning at Jimmy Carter’s childhood home helped me realize how much Carter and his life journey was a part of who we were and are. There is something deeply solemn about the single notes of a bell. There is a finality in the sound, a mournful final marking of a death.

And more. It tolls a summons to a reckoning. It is the end of one man’s journey, but it is not that alone. President Carter’s life journey was part of more than we can ever fully understand, the journey of a people from one America to another. And in its stark reality, a journey that expressed the core values of our true cultural legacy and calls us even now to embrace with hope an uncertain future.

Born in the South of Jim Crow, and in a North that expressed in other equally tragic ways the failure of the American founding, Jimmy Carter’s understanding of the world, and his understanding of the imperatives of his religious faith, underwent profound change. Somehow, he would probably say with the help of God, he was able to see the connection between what a person comes to believe at the deepest level and how one should live in the world. He did not reinvent himself. He because a truer version of himself, and of America, and the journey was not his alone.

We all of a certain age, looking back on our youth and the world that we then accepted in large part as a natural order, see that we have made a similar journey. We came to understand the realities of our society in a different light. Not a new light, but the light of our traditional faiths. We stumbled and we erred. We tired and we fell short.

The years of his life, 1924 to 2024, were like any other century. Each year followed the past year and repeated the settled practices of life.

But that does not describe President Carter’s life and many of us joined him on this path. We found in our lives the courage and the insight to change our beliefs and, incompletely, how we understood and treated each other. We came to see that our hopes and dreams were enmeshed in a human-made and unequal system of economic and political conditions and laws. We began to realize that change meant, in John Lewis’s words, “good trouble,” and that what human greed and arrogance had built, a new generation could change.

I hope that the generations who will follow us, will listen to the 39 tolls on the bell that stood outside President Carter’s boyhood home, and see their own journey as a continuation of his and of his generation. We weakened, perhaps, some of the limitations that narrowed our vision and our choices. Too many still stand.

In honoring Jimmy Carter, we realize our own loss, as our generation passes on. We are all less as a result, but those of us that remain have still much that we can do. We can pass on his and our vision of the good life. We can offer that vision to succeeding generations. Although we die, we will be with them as they follow the trail that Jimmy Carter helped blazed, a journey into a new and better future.