"Who was your Elizabeth Edwards?" asks Jan Hoffman, author of "Elizabeth Edwards, Through Many Eyes," in the Week In Review section of The New York Times. "The goddess of frumpy wives and older mothers? The cancer patient who would not be defined by her disease? The noble, betrayed wife? The political operative whose complicity in covering up her husband's infidelity could have cost the Democratic Party the presidency? A modern Job? Or Icarus?" She was all of these, perhaps. In her article, Hoffman describes Edwards' complicated story, her simultaneous beatification and condemnation in the eyes of the public, and her desire to control the narrative of her own life as much as possible.
"'I laughed that I never was and don't want to be St. Elizabeth,' she wrote. 'But I cried that I don't want to be seen--and maybe here I should admit, remembered--as the worst of the portraits of me." I will admit while I was never the biggest fan of Mrs. Edwards, I had always felt sorry that she, like so many other women in positions of power, could only be either the saint or the sinner. It is my belief that there is still little room given for "complexity" in the way we view women, especially those in the public eye. It was reassuring to me, in light of this, that Hoffman concludes her own portrait of Edwards with an acknowledgement that she was "fallible" and "three-dimensional."
But this is not, primarily, what I wanted to say about Edwards. What interests me most about Edwards' story is how her life experiences and her facing death shaped her faith. Last Tuesday (the day on which Edwards died), I watched a replay of an interview with her from a year or so ago, in which the interviewer asked her about this. She replied that she could no longer expect the "all-powerful" God to intervene in her experience of hardship (the death of her son, her husband's infidelity, her illness). She had come to expect only that God would be with her in these experiences, and perhaps, help to enlighten her in and through them. "It's not the God I want," she said, "but it's the God I have."
I find these words incredibly powerful, especially in this Advent season. For Christians, Advent is a season of anticipation of and preparation for the coming of Immanuel, "God with us." We celebrate Advent (and Christmas) not because this "coming" was a one-time event, which occurred thousands of years ago. Our celebration each year is our affirmation that God's coming into the world--in the flesh and blood realities of our lives--is an ongoing reality. But the other lesson of the season--and of Edwards in the words she spoke above--is that this God comes in ways that are unexpected...and often unwanted. Born to poor parents in the humblest of circumstances, Jesus was the unlikeliest of saviors. And he lived his life in a way that challenged deeply the expectations of those who awaited his coming.
That she was able to face her death with courage and with a deepened sense of the human condition was, for Edwards, a personal experience of God's "coming." I look towards the end of this year in my own life--a year that held together unmeasurable joys and some very real sorrows--and I wonder how God's coming is taking shape in it all. What is being prepared? What will be born? I really can't say just yet, but I am fairly certain that it will be very different from what I had expected. But with an open heart, I will wait to find out....
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