c. 1999 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’s Press.)

UNDATED _ The National Transportation Safety Board is our national insurance policy against the terror of the unknown. In the same newscast telling the tale of a downed airplane, we see agency investigators, hastily dressed and combed as family members hurrying to a home of sudden death, rushing to the burned and jagged ring of earth of its crash site.

They are bearers of our national determination and need to discover the cause of every air crash, of every unexpected mishap of trains or buses, too. It is very American to look immediately for an explanation that will turn into a resolve to prevent a recurrence of such an incident.

The curiosity and pragmatism that embolden Americans to take on great projects such as transporting humans to the moon leave us uneasy with events we cannot master, anxious about closing any case without a satisfying or at least satisfactory explanation for what has taken place.

So it is with the death of championship golfer Payne Stewart and five others in what The New York Times headlined as a”baffling jet accident.” Baffling, a word that keeps us behind the fluttering police tape at a middle distance from the event. Reuters pulled the shroud of this crash closer around its buried body by announcing that”Mystery Surrounds CrashâÂ?¦.” Still, the word surrounds holds the mystery at bay, scattered as seeds are in clouds to make them rain. Mystery means secret in this context, something that can be pried out of the circumstances, out of the weather, perhaps, or the condition of the plane, or in some other fact that can be physically touched and measured by us.

It is far more difficult in this story of an athlete dying young to recognize the difference in the mystery we encountered here, all of us, webbed now together into one extended family, next-of-kin at every”breaking news”story. For the mystery here wells out of the passengers and crew members rather than their broken Lear Jet.

The mystery inheres in the one woman and five men whose paths came finally together on that last almost cloudless morning across the country. It is more spiritual than mechanical, more human than meteorological. In the same way F. Scott Fitzgerald could locate himself in the Midwest by writing of”our snow,”so we situate ourselves spiritually by recognizing this as”our flight”and”our mystery.” The cosmic stage was set with every element of ancient religious mystery. A full moon had shone down on the country the evening before, the harvest moon casting light on the sweep of fields, their yield now taken, the dead veils and stalks stripped and the earth turned for the next cycle of growth. Over these acres, where autumn’s death is but a sleep before spring’s new life, the plane would draw a great diagonal as it flew away from the fading moon toward the noonday sun.

For these are”our fields”and we only tend but do not create the mystery of life and death they contain. And the moon, on whose fullness the feasts of both Easter and Passover wait each spring, is the constant symbol of time.

The moon has no light of its own but must be illuminated by the sun, the symbol of eternity. It is the moon that is mistress to our human state as it endlessly surrenders its aged fullness to apparent death before it rises, slender, new, and never dead, fed by the eternal sun.

Against this background, this flight is less”baffling”and the mystery does not”surround”but suffuses the lives of Payne Stewart, and those who found their way _ along routes with different beginnings and mid-points _ to the side of this plane gleaming in the sun as the moon paled in the morning sky.

Can we find the pattern that brought them finally together as the fated travelers are in Thornton Wilder’s”The Bridge of San Luis Rey,”each with a journey that looked different but with a destiny that was the same? And so the plane fell, tumbling straight down just as the bridge did in the novel, against the sky, the sun and moon, to complete the cycle of mystery by returning these pilgrims to the embrace of Mother Earth.

This is a problem _ as TWA 800 was after it crashed off Long Island a few years ago _ that, despite the elaborate reconstruction of its fragments, it may hide its secrets still. That is why this is, and will remain,”our”flight and”our”mystery.

DEA END KENNEDY