FRANK BRUNI: A politician takes a sledgehammer to his own ego

In the market for Easter Sunday inspiration? Try the parable of the blind man who gave up political glory for Jesus Christ.

He quickly climbed the rungs of power, became the lieutenant governor of the state of Washington at 35 and had reason to believe that he’d be governor someday, maybe even before he turned 40.

His ascent impressed people all the more because of his disability. At the age of 8, he lost his sight: A rare cancer forced the removal of both of his retinas. He spent the next decades proving that he could nonetheless accomplish just about anything that he set his mind to.

Then the man, Cyrus Habib, had an awakening.

“How many ways,” he said “can you be called a rising star?”

His redirection has nothing to do with the coronavirus pandemic, he said. But it does reflect the moral inventory that many people conduct amid great suffering, the type of spiritual epiphany they experience in the face of terrifying uncertainty.

“We’re not completely in control,” he told me during a series of long telephone conversations over the past two weeks. “Something that you can’t even see with the naked eye is ravaging us.”

If anything, that bolsters his resolve to take a sledgehammer to the old fortifications of his ego. “That can-do, can-overcome mentality is fantastic and can get you far,” he said. “But if hardened into an ideology of its own, it can crowd God out, because it makes you into a kind of god and says: ‘I’m not a contingent creature. I’m completely independent.’”

Are our most obvious achievements catalysts for contentment, or are they a prison? Can we tend to others if we’re constantly fussing over ourselves? Many of us are afraid to ask those questions. Habib wasn’t.

“He has a tremendous degree of self-reflection,” said Ronan Farrow, his roommate at Yale Law. “He’s a person on a journey, and he has developed a stillness and a centered-ness that I wouldn’t have necessarily expected, because he was this bright, shining, super-ambitious leader. ”

Habib’s parents immigrated to America from Iran. He was born here, their only child, and was still an infant when he received a diagnosis of retinoblastoma. His left retina was removed before his third birthday. In order to preserve the right one for as long as possible, he went through radiation and chemotherapy.

When he flashed back to that, he focused on his parents’ ordeal. “Hell is probably not dissimilar to walking into a pediatric cancer ward and seeing, as my parents had to, beds of kids lined up, each connected to an IV pump, and knowing your kid is going to be joining that.”

He also called himself lucky. Being able to see until he was 8, he said, let him amass a thick catalog of visual memories. But losing his sight in childhood rather than adulthood meant he was able to adapt while his brain was still plenty elastic.

“I learned Braille,” he said, “while other kids were learning cursive.”

He went to public schools in the Seattle suburbs, and his parents insisted that he not be treated differently than other children were. Habib has often told the story of how his mother, Susan Amini, responded when she learned that he was being kept on the sidelines of the school playground because he was blind and administrators worried that he’d hurt himself: She marched to the principal’s office, declared that she would teach him the layout of the playground and demanded that he be given full access to it from then on. A broken arm, she said, could be fixed more easily than a broken spirit.

Habib devoured literature and history, reading in Braille or listening to recordings. “Books allowed me to see — through the eyes of the author,” he said.

He excelled academically. He made sure to. He took up karate, downhill skiing. Outperforming his peers was insurance against being marginalized.

“Every step that you’re taking, it seems like there’s another one you need to take,” Goldberg said. “You see it with Andrew Cuomo. He’s doing a fantastic job in New York and people can’t leave it alone there. The focus immediately shifts to whether he’s going to replace Joe Biden or is he going to run in 2024 or 2028.”

Habib said that federal lawmakers increasingly seemed to be interested in posturing, not problem-solving, which involves compromise. “You have to face the political reality you’re in and not just present a competing utopia,” he said.

But what challenged his thinking about his future perhaps more than anything else was his father’s death in late 2016 at 64. It was a lesson in nonnegotiable limits, it broke his heart.

“Someone once said, ‘To say that your heart is broken is very close to saying that your heart is broken open,’” Habib told me, adding that his sadness “made me ask myself: Am I experiencing real joy? Is this the path I want to travel?”

Sometime this fall he’ll report to a novitiate in Los Angeles, where he’ll live among other Jesuits. “He’ll have a dramatic change of life, from being lieutenant governor of Washington to being told he’s cleaning the bathroom the wrong way,” Martin told me.

His mother agreed, telling me: “I actually joked with him that I wanted to see how that vow of obedience was going to work for him. More power to the Jesuits, I have to say.”

I asked Habib about chastity. He said that while he’d had romances, he’d never had an urge to be married with kids, so that part of the priesthood isn’t so daunting.

What about the surrender of his autonomy to the order’s directives? Wouldn’t his world become smaller?

“I was thinking to myself, ‘If I don’t summit, people will never believe that it was because of the bronchitis or altitude sickness — they’ll think it’s because I’m blind’,” he said. “I never told that story publicly, because it shows my vanity — that the only thing I feared more than death was public humiliation.”

He’s ashamed of that. But he’s also doing something remarkable about it.