During our move to the new Deseret News building, I unearthed a piece of buried treasure I'd completely forgotten: my tape of a teleconference interview with former President Jimmy Carter back in January of 1995.
When I listened to the tape again, however, I heard something new. The interview speaks volumes about the way many devout Christians - Christians like Jimmy Carter - think and write.In 1995 Carter published a small book of poetry called "Always a Reckoning." The interview was arranged to showcase the book. At one point on the tape I mention that many of my readers are LDS and would probably be interested in the "spiritual aspects" of his poetry. I asked Carter what kind of "spiritual lens" he used to view the world.
"When I write things about human rights," he said, "or about how we learn to hate using words, or when I dwell on my mother's experience nursing a child with leprosy, those kind of things I believe have a very strong spiritual or religious overtone."
Then he said something very telling:
"I've written several poems that concentrate almost exclusively on some religious aspects of my life, but I haven't seen fit to publish any of those yet. But there's no doubt that throughout the poems there is the same kind of religious impact that I have within my own life personally."
Christians like Jimmy Carter feel a need - even a compulsion - to "bear witness" to the workings of the spirit in the world and their hearts. And that means leaving a testimony of their lives - warts and all. Carter will published his personal poems. He has to. He has no choice.
It's a religious notion older than Adam, actually: Before you can open the heart of others, you must be brave enough to open your own. You must own up to your experiences.
As Emerson had it: "The true preacher deals his life out to the people - life passed through the fire of thought."
In one of the first Christian sermons, Paul writes, "When I was a child, I spoke as a child. I understood as a child, I thought as a child; but when I became a man, I put away childish things."
It's Paul's life - passed through the fire of thought.
"I traveled all over the world, to places I didn't really need to go, in my work of evangelism, and I wish I'd stayed home and helped with the children," Billy Graham told a national television audience last week.
Graham's life. Through the fire of thought.
When a rabbi speaks of his failings, when a Mormon stands in testimony meeting to talk about repentance, complete with personal anecdotes, heads in the congregation snap to attention and nod.
And sifting through my interview with Carter, through his poems and autobiographical works, I see that Carter's compulsion to bear witness drives all his writing.
"I have lusted in my heart," he told us all at one point.
The lust may not have been obsessive, but his need to share it with us was.
In the final chapter of Carter's new book "Living Faith," Carter gets down to basics. He leaves us his testimony of faith. He wonders aloud how he would have behaved if he'd been there the night that Mary washed the feet of Jesus:
It was an abnormal event 2000 years ago; it would be even more strange today. The setting is intriguing, the waste of money seemingly inappropriate, the intimacy between the woman and the honored guest disturbing . . .
If I had been there, and I had known that this was the Son of God, who was going to die in six days as a sacrifice for me, I hope that, like Mary, I would have done something dramatic to show him my love and gratitude, without considering whether it might be gauche, excessive or embarrassing.
Carter's interviews, writings and poems bear witness. That's exactly what he would have done. Then he would have sat down, got out a pen and left us his witness.