[Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents Volume 30, Number 5 (Monday, February 7, 1994)]
[Pages 194-195]
[Online from the Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]

<R04>
Remarks at the National Prayer Breakfast

February 3, 1994

    Thank you very much. Thank you very much, Senator Stevens. Ladies 
and gentlemen, you have to forgive me; my voice has not quite returned. 
The Vice President said earlier that being on the same program with 
Mother Teresa reminded him of the basketball player who scored one point 
in a game where Michael Jordan scored 68, and then he said for the rest 
of his life, ``Well, we scored 69 points together.'' I feel like the guy 
who comes in with 5 seconds left to go with--the team's gotten a 40-
point lead, and all I have to do is hold the ball until the buzzer 
rings. [Laughter]
    First of all, I thank you, Mother Teresa, for your moving words and 
more importantly for the lifetime of commitment, for you have truly 
lived by what you say, something we would all do well to emulate, and I 
thank you for that.
    Like all of you, I was so moved by the profession of faith and the 
experiences of Mother Teresa that almost anything that any of us could 
say would be anticlimactic. However, I would like to make these points 
as briefly as I can, for we come here to pray for those in authority, 
those given, by the people of the United States under our Constitution 
and laws, responsibility and the opportunity of making decisions every 
day which affect all of us.
    First I say that this prayer breakfast is an important time to 
reaffirm that in this Nation where we have freedom of religion, we need 
not seek freedom from religion. The genius of the book which I have 
promoted almost shamelessly for the last several months, ``The Culture 
of Disbelief,'' by Professor Stephen Carter, is that very point, that we 
should all seek to know and to do God's will, even when we differ.
    Second, if we really seek to do that, it requires certain personal 
characteristics that, very frankly, all of us in this room who have ever 
been elected to anything have abandoned from time to time, including me. 
It requires first that we be humble, that we know that even as we seek 
to do God's will, we remember what President Lincoln said, ``The 
Almighty has his own purposes, and we are not capable of fully knowing 
them.'' It requires, second, that we be honest and that we be fair. 
Sometimes I think the commandment we most like to overlook in this city 
is, ``Thou shalt not bear false witness.'' Third, it requires that we 
give our bitterness and our resentments up.
    I was thinking of this when Mother Teresa told the story of the 
person who died in her arms saying simply, ``Thank you,'' not, ``I'm 
cold, I'm hungry,'' a simple thank you, someone with more cause to be 
resentful, more

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cause to be bitter, more cause to be angry than anyone in this room 
could ever be bitter or angry or resentful because of what one of us has 
said or done to the other; and still dying with a simple thank you. 
Somehow we all have to give up our resentments. We have to find the 
courage and the faith to forgive ourselves and to forgive our foes. And 
if we cannot, we will surely fail.
    Finally, that will permit us to do what Mother Teresa has done, to 
focus every day on other people. If Christ said we would all be judged 
by how we treated the least of these--the hungry, the thirsty, the 
naked, the strangers, the imprisoned--how can we meet that test in a 
town where we all spend so much time obsessed with ourselves and how we 
stand on the totem pole and how we look in the morning paper. Five years 
from now, it will be nothing. Five hundred years from now, the papers 
will be dust. And all that will endure is the strength and the integrity 
and the beauty of what we felt and what we did.
    Today, this headline is in our papers: ``Nineteen Children Found 
Amid Squalor in Chicago Apartment,'' not in Calcutta but in Chicago, 19 
children living amid human waste and cockroaches, fighting a dog for 
food.
    I say to you, we will always have our differences; we will never 
know the whole truth. Of course, that is true. But if we have learned 
today, again, that we must seek to know the will of God and live by it, 
that to do it we have to give up our bitterness and our resentment, we 
have to learn to forgive ourselves and one another, and we have to 
fight, as hard as it is, to be honest and fair, and if we can be focused 
on others and not ourselves, realizing that we did not get one whit of 
power from the Constitution and laws from the framers to do anything for 
ourselves, it all comes for the purpose of helping others. Then perhaps 
we can do honor to the faith and to the God who has brought us all here 
today.
    Thank you, and God bless you all.

Note: The President spoke at 9:47 a.m. in the Cabinet Room at the 
Washington Hilton Hotel.