Prospero to Joe Biden: Time to "Break Your Staff, Drown Your Book?"

Suspended animation…. those timeless few seconds between the instant you know the crash is inevitable and the moment of actual impact. A single blank freeze frame that takes in the whole thing in a surreal, catatonic déjà vu.

That’s what it feels like to me to be an American citizen right now.

On the evening of June 27 the election was essentially decided. The American electorate collectively awoke to the sobering realization that Joseph Biden was most likely unelectable. It is one of the more stunning phase transitions I’ve ever witnessed in American politics. Out of left field, more a “blink” (as Malcolm Gladwell would have it) than a deliberation.  But like all phase transitions it is unanimous, and once the threshold has been crossed, the course is irreversible.

….irreversible, that is, except in the eyes of Biden’s own Democratic party. Caught in the predictable human stew of identification, entitlement, political correctness, and the dying rhetorical fumes of a liberal/progressive era now long since gone by, they seem to be militantly in denial about the irrevocable nature of what happened on June 27. Instead, they keep pushing exactly the wrong strategy: damage control. The best game plan they can come up with seems to be a collective collusion to quell all tremors within their own ranks and to proclaim loudly and insistently that the debate was simply an anomaly, that this visibly frail and fading human being is up to the task of another brutal four years of governance.

My twenty-one-year-old granddaughter, who watched the debacle like a kid strapped in a car seat in the back seat of that careening vehicle, was not deceived. She who has never voluntarily darkened the door of a church assessed the situation with laser-like spiritual acuity:

“Pride.”

No, not pride in the sense of a virulent narcissism, like Trumpian pride. Joe Biden has been a dedicated and humble public servant all his life, and the obligation he sees himself as taking on—personally standing in the breach between American Democracy and Donald Trump—is fully consistent with his highest values of servanthood and moral responsibility as he imbibed them from the post World War II ambience of his youth and the PreVatican II Catholicism of his early upbringing. They have been a lifelong moral compass for him, the compass by which he steers, the substance of the story he has woven of himself, from which he does indeed still draw extraordinary grace and resilience.

But just here is the problem. And it’s not simply a problem for Joe Biden, but for all of us (myself conspicuously included) who are now traversing our seventies and eighties and find ourselves suddenly face-to-face with a new and unexpected life task: To surrender that very story out of which you have woven your own life. To release the core persona you imagine yourself to be, along with the resilience and strength you draw from that persona. To put it more bluntly, to be willing to shoot the horse that has carried you your entire journey.

Joe Biden is indeed “TOO OLD:” not just because his body is becoming more visibly frail, or his executive function intermittently waning. Not just because, like most of us active seniors, he wants to live a little out ahead of the curve of what he can actually responsibly manage (“stubborn,” it’s called). But TOO OLD because his mind and heart are enmeshed in a rhetoric—an identity, a chief feature—that no longer corresponds to a reality that most younger Americans can even recognize, let alone get on board with. And because he refuses or is unable to loose his grip on that core identity to discover what deeper molding God may have in store for his final fruition. Thus, in his very stubbornness, he turns into a rock in the stream bed. The water flows on around him.

At a similar turning point  excruciatingly captured in Shakespeare’s play The Tempest, the aging magician Prospero arrives at his “come to Jesus” moment in his sudden realization that the magician’s tricks he has relied on to carry him this far can carry him no farther. In a fateful, irrevocable blaze of contrition, he exclaims,

“This rough magic I here abjure… I’ll break my staff…I’ll drown my book…”

Prospero’s staff is his will: the iron force of his resolve and determination that have held life together for himself and his daughter for all these years. His book is his tremendous erudition and skill: the spells he has woven and can weave even now with a snap of the hand; the “tricksy spirits” that will fly to his assistance at his beck and call.

When the moment arrives that we find ourselves standing on the threshold of true elderhood, these are the things we will all be called upon to yield as the price of admission to this new and wondrously ultimate season of our life. We will all be asked to release our Ariel, “that tricksy spirit” at once our core identity and the power pack that has delivered the goods. Release all that hard-earned individuation and agency, and instead consign ourselves naked and malleable into the hands of the Mercy.

Cynthia's granddaughter, Ava, steering the boat

To refuse the invitation is by default to become old.

In the final analysis, Prospero surrenders into the future because of his love for his daughter Miranda. He sees that the resources he has drawn on to sustain himself are no longer working; they are causing hardship for the very people he holds most dear. In a stunning paroxysm of conscience he releases all the agency he has painstakingly acquired. And something purer and more primordial than even his deepest realization of his own self carries him across and into the new uncharted country of the heart.

If only it might be the same for Joe Biden, for our country, for my granddaughter, and for all the other Mirandas of her generation who are going to have to deal with the consequences of a noble human being who is not yet willing or able to take this final, inexorable step toward his liberation. Believe me, I take this as a wake-up call for myself as well.

So yes, that moment of suspended animation between the recognition of the absolute certainty of the crash and the actual moment of impact… June 27 to November 5. And yes, I recognize there is still one last, daring option: to grab the wheel and dramatically change course. That chance still lies open to the Democratic Party. But I fear that they are still too deeply coopted and in denial to take it.

And so, like so many other Americans, I sit strapped in my car seat in lucid, surreal calm, awaiting the inevitable crash.