c. 1996 Religion News Service

(Eugene Kennedy is a writer living in Chicago.)

(UNDATED) Old railroad stations, John Cheever observed, were built like cathedrals: Their vast spaces invited meditation, the sun fell through great windows on marble floors and pew-like benches.

Here were celebrated the mysteries of ordinary time: waiting and expectation, separation and reunion, dangerous leave-taking and safe return. This sense of the sacramentality of everyday life hardly survives in airports but our comings and goings, each seeded with mystery, are celebrated every day within them.

Religious mystery is more commonplace than exotic and is hidden, as all spiritual things are, in plain sight in everyday life.

And the mysteries of TWA Flight 800, broken and consumed above the altar-flat Atlantic on a midsummer’s eve in 1996, have only multiplied and deepened since then. The questions that resist answers are aspects of a mystery greater than how the accident happened or by whose hand, a religious mystery that cannot be solved but only contemplated.

In a language softer than that of its tangled debris we hear Flight 800’s revelation to us about everything of human importance and meaning.

Against the tell-all code of a shameless television culture, this great ship has held its ultimate secrets to itself, letting go of them in its own time. Someday the reconstruction and analysis of the jet will tell us all the facts. Left will be what radiates gently from Flight 800 even now, the religious mystery in those waters marked forever sacred by the last tongues of flame on its bobbing remains.

Death and Mystery care little for our schedules. Neither of them meet the press or go on Larry King. Ordinary people must reclaim their own instinct for true mystery, for seeing that the spiritual is not supplied by Special Effects but is part of the fabric of everyday life. Given a chance, average men and women easily recognize the identifying signs of religious mystery.

Perhaps the most distinguishing characteristic of religious mystery is that, Buddha-like, it remains untouched and unmoved by our desires. Silent and majestic as a distant thunderhead, the real mystery of Flight 800 invites us, but does not explain itself to us.

As with the Holocaust, the profoundly holy in our midst transcends our understanding, will not be summed up or settled down, and will never exhaust our meditations or memorials. America, addicted to”talk”as in”talk radio”or”talking about it”as in”pseudo-therapy,”is stunned by ineffability.

Religious mystery may hide itself but it always reveals the truth about us. As politicians learned in the presence of Flight 800, it is dangerous to squeeze in front of the blinding core of religious mystery. Better than a CAT scan, it lets everybody see right through us.

True religious mystery is more associated with our losses than our gains in life. Spirituality cannot be domesticated into a means for commercial success, a la Dr. Deepak Chopra, without making a sacrilege of its mystery. That is why our personal religious faith, not some abstract dogma, is tested when a mystery as terrible as Flight 800 hovers biblically over the waters.

Traditional faiths, from whose depths the Kaddish and the Dies Irae have been wrenched to give voice to ageless suffering, are cleansed by the flames of tragedy. At such times, ordinary people tell us whether and how real faith works. On the night the plane crashed, my cousin Jim Cullen, along with his friend Michael O’Reilly, drew on long tested belief as he helped pull bodies onto their boat. Listen to him on that darkest of nights as he faced into this grimmest of work,”Mike, they’re only bodies. The souls have gone to heaven.” Religious mystery is never a punishment, although that is a favorite theme of some zealots who interpret every tragedy, such as the AIDS epidemic, as God’s sword of judgment falling on the unrighteous. Worse still, the New Age cannot address the tragic at all. Death is degraded into an unmentionable enemy, religious mystery becomes cheap grace through crystals, the waters of rebirth come in Evian bottles, and eternal life is confused with living to be 100.

Finally, theological mystery always turns our attention back to the ordinary. Flight 800’s passenger list was celebrity-free, offering us an uncontaminated sample and the pure revelation of average men and women. Each had already passed what we all dread, a final judgment. Choosing Paris, they responded to what was eternal in their own souls and so passed judgment on themselves by affirming their lives.

In their lives, already full whatever their age, we find a celebration of the everyday virtues that bind life together. Love traveled with Andrew Krukar carrying an engagement ring for his girlfriend. Gharran and Nina Haurani, going to Paris for their 25th anniversary, and Edwin and Ruth Brooks, married 56 years and celebrating her 80th birthday, paid honor to fidelity.

Hope is found in the young members of the French Club from Montoursville, Pa., brimming with curiosity and wonder, with a thirst for knowledge and discovery. David Hogan was returning to Paris to write music while guitarist Marcel Dadi was going home with an award for that he had already played.

Before 39-year-old Jack O’Hara left his top job at ABC Sports he paid tribute to duty by carrying out his last assignment. He had circulated a memo announcing his departure that began,”Change is good.” How much these passengers had accomplished, how much they planned to do on the voyages, so like our own, of going to weddings, celebrating milestones, initiating missions of work, ambition and simple pleasure. Just like us, we might say, and we thereby pierce the veil of this religious mystery: We hear the voices that sonar cannot sense speaking truths deeper than those that will come out of any investigation. How alive these men and women _ our brothers and sisters, our fellow passengers _ remain at the heart of this profoundly human religious mystery.

MJP END KENNEDY