Birmingham native, National Security Adviser Rice tells her story

During an Aug. 4 Sunday School class at National Presbyterian Church in Washington, D.C., National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice testified to her Christian faith. Rice, 47, told her listeners that, growing up as a “preacher’s kid” in Birmingham in the late 1950s and early ’60s, church was the center of her family’s life.
   
She said that she never doubted the existence of God, but when she moved to California in 1981 to join the faculty at Stanford University, “there were a lot of years when I was not attending church regularly. I was traveling a lot. I was a specialist in international politics, so I was always traveling abroad.”
   
She recalled that one Sunday as she was grocery shopping near her home, a black man who was buying items for a church picnic asked Rice if she played the piano.
   
Rice, who was trained in her youth to be a concert pianist, said she did. The church, a little African-American Baptist church in Palo Alto, was looking for someone to play piano.
   
“So I started playing for that church,” Rice said. “That got me regularly back into churchgoing.”
   
Rice ended up playing at the church for six months before deciding to return to her roots, the Presbyterian Church.
   
She recalled, “On a Sunday morning, I went to Menlo Park Presbyterian Church [in Palo Alto]. The minister that Sunday morning gave a sermon I will never quite forget. It was about the Prodigal Son from the point of view of the elder son. It set the elder son up, not as somebody who had done all the right things, but as somebody who had become self-satisfied.”
   
The minister that day spoke about self-satisfaction, Rice recalled, “that people who didn’t somehow expect themselves to need to be born again can be complacent. I started to think of myself as that elder son, who had never doubted the existence of God, but wasn’t really walking in faith in an active way anymore.”
   
That was the turning point in Rice’s life. “I started to become more active with the church, to go to Bible study and to have a more active prayer life.
   
“My father was an enormous influence in my spiritual life,” Rice told her audience. “He was a theologian, a doctor of divinity. He was someone who let you argue about things. And when I had questions, which we all do, he encouraged that.”
   
Rice said one character her father appreciated in the Gospels was Doubting Thomas. “He thought that was a little story from Christ about the fact it was OK to question,” she said, “and that Christ knew that Thomas needed to feel His wounds  — he needed that physical contact. And then, of course, Christ said, when you can accept this on faith, it will be even better.”
   
Like many Americans, Rice focused on her faith in God after the horror of Sept. 11, particularly because her position forced her to face the tragedy as a national security issue.
   
She said, “In this job, when we faced a horrible crisis like Sept. 11, you go back in your mind and think, ‘Is there anything I could have done? Might I have seen this coming? Was there some way?’ When you go through something like that, you have to turn to faith because you can rationalize it, you can make an intellectual answer about it, but you can’t fully accept it until you can feel it here,” said Rice, tapping her chest. “That time wasn’t a failure, but it was a period of crisis when faith was really important for me.”
   
Rice said her faith in God allows her to have a “kind of optimism about the future. You look around you and you see an awful lot of pain and suffering and things that are going wrong. It could be oppressive.
   
“But when I look at my own story or many others that I have seen, I think, ‘How could it possibly be that it has turned out this way?’ Then my only answer is it’s God’s plan. And that makes me very optimistic that this is all working out in a proper way if we all stay close to God and pray and follow in His footsteps.”
   
Prayer has been an important focus for the Bush Administration, Rice said.
   
“I greatly appreciate, and so does the president, the prayers of the American people,” she said.
   
She added, “There are a lot of people who are of faith, starting with the president. When you are in a community of faithful, it makes a very big difference not only in how people treat each other, but in how they treat the task at hand.” (EP)