c. 1998 Religion News Service

(Eugene Kennedy, a longtime observer of the Roman Catholic Church, is professor emeritus of psychology at Loyola University in Chicago and author most recently of”My Brother Joseph, published by St. Martin Press.)

UNDATED _ In an old photograph, the first president of this century, Theodore Roosevelt, sits with his favorite son, Quentin, in his lap looking down the years to us. Quentin’s death in World War I that broke TR’s heart and his glory in war is outside their focus.

Yet their eyes suggest that hints of future sorrow had already invaded them, and that the poignancy of this so vulnerable relationship of father and son remains undiminished 100 years later. They are looking into our eyes right now.

Is all our suffering stored somewhere in quarries of the spirit that match those of our oil reserves? Or is it in us, its energy capable of transformation only by a spirituality as deeply rooted as sorrow itself?

Ancient documents and artifacts can be dated through a technique that measures the”half life”of the carbon isotopes found within them. Physics also tells us that energy is never destroyed but only transformed.

Unlike carbon isotopes, the vintage of our suffering does not age into mellowness. It lives outside of time and has no half life encoded in it. No steady measurable disintegration occurs. If we drink from it, it is no less bitter than on the day we first experienced it.

Even now this suffering drifts above us from the other side of the world, a cloud darker than any spewed by a volcano, seeded with particles of human sorrow. It is born of the grief of the mourners _ for Rachel has never stopped weeping for her children _ who claim, bear home and bury the dead from the recent bombings of U.S. embassies in Africa.

They disappear from the television screen, to be succeeded by those laying to rest their dead in Kosovo or Belfast. Do we think that they bury their sorrow with their loved ones? Or is their grief, beyond our gaze, as fresh and uncomforted as when it was first inflicted?

That is why, in Catholic devotions, there has always been a Mother of Sorrows, Mary, whose grief, like ours, has no half life.

How do these spiritual figures arise except in response to human need? Our pain is too sacred to be buried in a Potter’s Field of forgetfulness. The Mother of Sorrows offers a heart that makes a place for all the unconsoled suffering of history.

Pragmatic Americans, however, do not sit idle before this specter of pain. We want to deal with it, relieve it, work it through, come, as we say, to”closure”and file the episode away. Can we blame ourselves for seeking a place of sanctuary where barred from entry is that pain of the soul that flows from life’s losses, especially of loved ones?

We have a new profession, grief counselors, who help people find their way through the mourning process. We want to guide them through the five stages of grief that have been plotted, from denial to acceptance, by Elizabeth Kubler-Ross. We seem to believe that if we can organize and number something _ 12 steps, five stages, three strikes, one last chance _ we have mastered the phenomenon and got it under control.

That may be why we speak of bringing”closure”to episodes of grief. But is that possible, as Cardinal John O’Connor of New York noted at a service for the relatives of those killed two summers ago in TWA Flight 800, when a few words or a familiar song reinstate the sorrow at full strength in our souls?

A lady in Michigan, whose adult daughter died in 1996, has begun a program entitled 30:11 after the verse in Psalms,”You have turned for me my mourning into dancing.”The heart of her approach is profoundly spiritual _ to transform the never destroyed energy of her grief into healing the psychological suffering of others.

We can only meet grief with faith. Faith is not an assent to a number of creedal statements. It is a spiritual dynamic that is not touched by time and is unafraid of sorrow. It teaches us that the lessons of grief, like the sad light in Teddy Roosevelt’s eyes, purchase one great understanding for us. All of us who can laugh and weep are related to each other as members of the same family.

DEA END KENNEDY