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 _ Have you ever wondered why the nation’s night air is so thick with inconclusive commentary about the scandals and rumors of scandals hanging like an unbudgeable low on the weather map of our times?
Perhaps more troublesome than the scandals themselves, however, is the inability of any of the expert guests to find the right words to describe what is happening to us.
The incessant solicitation and offering of opinion remain unfruitful and we remain frustrated because the guests come and go and we never seem to get anywhere. They are like stand-up comics who have been on the screen so long we can recite their punchlines before they can.
This is great for Larry King, Chris Matthews, Geraldo and other television hosts because they can invite the same guests back over and over, confident they will never settle or dam off the issues that flow like sewer water through our culture.
While they have raised the description of the fouled water to a fine art, they have not, however, explained why there was a leak in the first place, how the water became contaminated or its effect on us internally.
Why are you tired of all this repetitious talk?
These savants, familiar enough by now to be termed the”usual suspects,”cannot explain because they lack the insight and vocabulary to identify and explore the essentially spiritual character of this ongoing crisis.
That these commentators never even have a distraction that would lead them to the spiritual vacuum at the heart of this episode accidentally illuminates its nature for us. What has been battered beyond recognition, often by these guest analysts, is the very tool needed to render our experience intelligible to us.
The word is the victim of our contemporary muggers of the spiritual. The word, as we have understood it throughout biblical history _ the Word _ as in”This is the Word of the Lord”or”The Word Made Flesh”has been defiled as if it were a temple vandalized by Nazis.
The late scripture scholar, Father John McKenzie, described”the divine reality of the spoken word,”adding that”…this is most clearly seen in the words that are uttered with solemnity, such as the words of covenant, marriage, contracts, promises and similar commitments …. The reality and power of the word are rooted in the personality who utters the word; it is a release of psychic energy and when it is uttered with power it posits the reality which it signifies.” The word is, therefore, sacramental and reverence for its authority is central to any spiritual experience or expression. This is true in everyday life. Something sacred and saving transpires when a person says”My word is my bond,”or”I give you my word on this.”Fidelity is rooted in words spoken from deep within the personalities of husband and wife.
With few exceptions, the roster of nightly commentators demonstrate no acquaintanceship with the sacramentality of the word. For them, and for the legions of hapless spinners, the word is not spoken to honor the truth but to hide or to distort it. The word made a tool of deceit is what has led to people’s accepting with straight faces definitions of what is and is not sexual activity that insult the sacred character of human understanding and human sexuality. Words used to split moral hairs mock the sacramental quality of human conversation.
As a result, we feel barren. That is what the nightly commentators document in and through their observations. We feel as we do because the word that makes humankind spiritually fruitful has been stolen from us.
This leaves us on a desperate moral plain, sworled and wan as the moon’s, where, our scared words despoiled, we can no longer speak authentically of virtue or even give the right name to evil.
DEA END KENNEDY
