Part 3

John Paul the Great: Remembering a Spiritual Father
by Peggy Noonan

(Page 3 of 3)

A friend of mine who used to work with retarded children told me once that Down syndrome children would often ask her to comb her long blond hair. She'd take it out of its ponytail, give it a shake, and they'd run in it. They'd touch it and pat it and walk through it as they would curtains. It takes a kind of spiritual genius to know a hunk of hair is heaven. They knew. The pope knows they know.

And then the audience was over. The handlers and cardinals descended again, surrounded the pope, hauled him up, and helped him transfer from the white chair back to the wheel throne. They began to push him from the stage.

He turned to us, raised his right hand, and made a halting sign of the cross. And then the Poles in the audience broke into the song that went back to the beginning, the authentic sound of twenty-three years earlier, when John Paul first walked onto the Vatican balcony and looked out at the world. They had sung it for him at every stop along the way of his long papacy, through good times and bad. "Sto lat, Sto lat, May you live a hundred years."

I stayed until the very end, two hours. Then I turned around to look at all the people standing behind me, to see their faces so I could describe them in this book. And I was taken aback, because they were gone. Two thirds of the audience had already left, had gone before the pope had even departed the stage. As if they'd had their tickets punched - I saw the old guy - and were on their way next to see the cats in the Colosseum. The only ones who remained were the ones who would not, could not, go, like the Polish girl who sat and wept.

His whole life was a good-bye tour now. He knew they came to see him in part because they wanted to be able to say, "I saw John Paul the Great." And so there was at all these events, and around him, a sense of inescapable twilight.

An explosion of sadness would mark his passing. Yes, it was time for a new man, one who hadn't been so battered by history. But John Paul was a giant, the last pope of the old age. After him the real modern world would begin, the new one, the post-9/11 one, and much would be in play. His presence was as weighty and dense as the old Vatican itself, and his departure would seem to leave a void in the landscape.

His suffering was his witness. Every other leader in the world stands straight and tall; they employ scores of aides who tell them to throw back their shoulders and walk forward looking like the leader of France, or England, or America. These public souls are acutely conscious of their public presentation. But John Paul came out broken and bent, as broken as the Christ on the cross he carried on his crozier.

When asked how he was, he often joked, "I'm in good shape from the neck up! Not so good from the neck down."

An aide who had watched him for a long time asked him once, "Do you ever cry?"

"Not outside," he replied.

When I returned from Rome, I talked to the writer Michael Novak about the meaning of the suffering of the pope. He spoke of Saint Thérèse of Lisieux, who believed her suffering could be given by her, could be almost lifted out of her, to help others. She would take her moments of pain or sadness and offer them to God, believing they could in this way become united with his great love, united, that is, with an infinitely powerful force. She would ask that her suffering be used to help the missionaries of the world, that her pain be used to make their day sweeter, their efforts more fruitful. She knew, Michael said, what Dostoyevsky knew: There's a kind of web around the world, an electric web in which we're all united, all connected in suffering and in love. When you add to it what you have, you add to the circuitry of love.

Thérèse was a Carmelite, and Michael spoke of the papal biographer George Weigel's observation that John Paul II had a Carmelite soul, a soul at home with the tradition of everyday mysticism. That tradition is informed by a conviction that all is connected, all is part of a wholeness.

The pope's suffering tells us, Michael said, that it is important in an age like ours to look beyond the surficial. We honor and adore surface things - beauty, youth, grace, vigor. And it's understandable: They're beautiful. But the pope reminds us it is crucial to see the beauty in the old, the infirm, the imperfect. They have a place in life, a purpose, a deep legitimacy and due. John Paul not only said this, of course, he also lived it. He showed us this truth by presenting himself to the world each day as he was.

I found myself thinking about this lesson in the months after I'd seen the pope, but I thought he was also telling us something else. When you witnessed his fragility, you felt prompted somehow, even if it wasn't quite conscious, to recognize, and love, the fragility of all our lives. That fragility is at the heart of things, is all part of the mystery, and it finally left me thinking, every time I saw him on TV or in a picture, of the words of Dennis Potter, the great writer of television dramas, who told BBC correspondent Melvyn Bragg in a celebrated 1994 interview what it was like to die. When you are dying, he said, you look out the window and see a flowering blossom and suddenly realize how beautiful it is, how extraordinary, "the whitest, frothiest, blossomest blossom that there ever could be."

By dying in public the old pope got us thinking about dying, which got us thinking about living, and life. And maybe feeling more tenderly toward it.

When he died I think we got a clue as to how much it all cost him, and what he felt. He asked, in his final requests, that a square of white silk be placed over his face in his casket. No one in the Vatican explained why. Then they announced it was "a new ritual." John Paul, in his papers, did not explain the request.

He did refer, however, in the last years of his papacy, to how he experienced life each day. Repeatedly pressed to retire, to give himself some rest after his mighty labors, he refused. "Christ didn't come down from the cross," he said.

But here's a funny thing: When I think of him now, I do not see him as he was last year or five years ago or even a decade ago. I do not see him as the John Paul I met, and whose hand I kissed. I see him as he was. I see him in my mind's eye as the man who walked out on the Vatican loggia one night in 1978, at dusk, when the sight of him was another kind of shock, and when his astounding papacy began.

© 2005 Viking, a division of Penguin Putnam, used by permission.

About the Author

Peggy Noonan was a special assistant to President Ronald Reagan from 1984 to 1986; in 1988, she was chief speechwriter to Vice President George Bush during his campaign for the presidency; in 1989, she left Washington, D.C., for her native New York, where she completed her first book, the bestselling What I Saw at the Revolution: A Political Life in the Reagan Years. Since that time, her articles and essays have appeared in Time, Newsweek, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Forbes, and many other publications. She is also author of The Case Against Hillary, a #1 New York Times bestseller. Currently, she is a columnist and contributing editor at The Wall Street Journal and a political contributor for Fox News.