c. 2004 Religion News Service

(Eugene Cullen Kennedy, a longtime observer of the Roman Catholic Church, is professor emeritus of psychology at Loyola University in Chicago and author of “Cardinal Bernardin’s Stations of the Cross,” published by St. Martin’s Press.)

(UNDATED) It is a Saturday evening Mass in the summertime, as ordinary as Ordinary Time itself. Except for the strange sound. It is not that of a great wind, as reported at the first Pentecost, or even that of a small wind.

The moan is intermittent, poignant enough to be that of a prisoner unjustly jailed, as fine-edged as the women keening for their lost loved ones in Irish playwright John Synge’s “Riders to the Sea,” indeed, as plaintive and as plain as sorrow itself.

In the pews we respond in classic Catholic style, eyes straight ahead, paying no attention, “What sound? I don’t hear anything,” then turning our heads, as if looking for something else when we really want to know: Who’s making that sound in church?

It comes from a sturdy young man in the care of devoted parents. We look away, ashamed of ourselves, for this sorrow rising from him is as pure as the care flowing from his mother and father.

Has the Age of Revelation really ended when, unexpectedly on a sleepy summer afternoon, this young man cries out from a wilderness, as John the Baptist did, proclaiming that the Kingdom of God is at hand, and that we stand within its gates and that he is its herald, bound by a mystery of loss yet freed by a mystery of love?

This is the plainchant of the World-As-It-Is that we experience Just-As-We-Are. We do not go to church to find this mystery but bring it with us for sacramental nourishment and validation, for in the Eucharist we experience our “everyday mystery,” with its losses and shortcomings, its hundred symptoms of sorrow and its one healing remedy of love.

Perhaps theologians have missed or mis-emphasized something through all these centuries of debating the mystery of the incarnation and death of Jesus. Many of them place economics over mystery as clearly as the Wall Street Journal’s recent headline “Same-Sex Marriage Would Add to U.S. Revenue.”

These scholars, and Mel Gibson in his “The Passion of the Christ” film, underscore the heavy price that Jesus pays in his own suffering for our sins. In this view, we are all sin and he is all sorrow.

The young man making the sound in church makes you think about that for, if there is sorrow in his life, there is no sin, and a manifestation of the unsought suffering that leaves “vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,” in the words of war poet Wilfred Owen, or stops the tongues altogether, as in this young man’s making the only sound he can, a signal about the random and undeserved suffering found as much in the gospel as in life itself.

Suppose the “aboriginal calamity” of which Cardinal Newman wrote was not that sin but rather that sorrow entered the world, for what is described of our human condition in Genesis is vague about sin but very clear about sorrow: “In sorrow thou shalt bring forth children /In the sweat of thy face thou shalt eat bread, till thou return unto the ground” (Genesis 3:18-19).

Do we suppose that these good parents caring for their grown son need any education about bringing forth children in sorrow? Do we not find in any gathering at any Eucharist those who are bent beneath their work as truly as Adam and Eve to provide bread for themselves and their children?

Do we hear many complaints from these good people kneeling around us? Can we imagine that these men and women coming down the aisle to receive the Eucharist do not suffer far more in trying to do the right thing with their lives than they ever could sin by deliberately doing wrong things in their lives?

If God answers Job out of the whirlwind, does he not speak to us out of the lament of the young man in church? God became man in Jesus not to pay off our sins but to live in and with our sorrows, to help us recognize them, as the young man and his parents do, as at the core of the Mystery of all life and love.

DEA/PH END KENNEDY