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) On a recent Sunday, Fox Television aired a program on the possibility of the world’s running out of oil, repeating what we already know: We use too much, reserves are finite and cannot be replaced, there is more demand than supply, and in the long run, the problem is paid for by ordinary people trying to lead ordinary lives.

And on a recent Friday, almost every television station aired a program on the impossibility of the world’s ever running out of sorrow, also repeating what we already know: We use too much, reserves are infinite and are never used up, and although there is an overwhelming supply and no demand, life is awash in it. And, in the long run, the problem is borne by ordinary people trying to lead ordinary lives.

They were reporting on the resignation of New Jersey Gov. James McGreevey.

That afternoon McGreevey’s tautly worded confession that he was gay and had an affair with another man was saturated in sorrow; there was enough for everybody watching there or on television.

But sorrow, even so intensely concentrated, revealed its depths and layers, wringing itself out before our eyes so that its own inner mystery lay exposed as it seldom is outside the Bible or Shakespeare. It was refracted through the needs of those who watched, those who reported it, and those who were standing closest to the governor, the innocent bystanders who are always splashed by the blood.

Reporter James Barron, writing in The New York Times, picked up its Rashomon character: “Some said it marked Mr. McGreevey as a risk taker with unusual personal courage. Some … openly gay said they felt sympathy for a man struggling with the same internal issues, some said it was a personal tragedy. But still others said it was simply politics … that McGreevey was using this … personal confession to draw attention from a more serious lapse … that he fears will be exposed.”

One state senator complained, “Boy, what a tough day it was!” A professor was distracted by thoughts of Richard Nixon, “when he said, `I’m not a crook.”’ An applied psychologist worried that the disclosure “puts the gay movement back.”

We must then refocus on McGreevey’s saying that he had long felt a “certain sense that separated me from others” and, by speaking openly, he laid down his sadness and was described a few days later as greatly relieved.

But if sorrow loosened its grip on him, it did not leave but remained, as we might say, standing by.

It pulsated in his wife, whose blond hair, well-made suit and contained good looks were almost a mirror image of the wife of Connecticut’s Gov. Michael Rowland when he resigned in an aura of scandal in June. Sorrow possessed them as fully as they possessed themselves, standing by their men, absorbing the rue and regret that was freed from their spouses by their public admissions.

And sorrow remained as ineradicable as the age lines in the faces of McGreevey’s homemaker mother and his former Marine drill instructor father, standing on each side of him. Pictures appeared _ as publicly as memories must have flooded them privately _ of them, in their 1960s best, standing with their small children, their daughter and the future governor.

They seemed to be absorbing all the sorrow in that small, so silent room as their son spoke, mentioning his wife but not them. Only from above do we see the governor’s mother clutching something in her right hand, a crumpled handkerchief shapeless and damp with the tears that flow every day everywhere in the world, the Niagara that will never run dry.

What do these parents know, as parents do, that parallels the newspaper account about their son who “turned personal charm, and a knack for street-level politicking into a meteoric rise in New Jersey politics. But almost from the start …”

Those last deadly accurate words tell a public story but also the private one of these sorrowing parents and the fault lines they had observed in their son and that they had prayed would hold and feared they would not. But almost from the start …

The world is filled with those who seem licensed to dispense such sorrow, sometimes out of their own immaturity or sickness _ the dictators and the predators, the killers and the thieves, the cheats and the garden-variety specialists in breaking the hearts of those who try to love them. Who bears the sorrows of the world if not those standing by, the vulnerable, who stand in for us as we wait for our turn to enter the Mystery of Sorrow?

DEA/PH END KENNEDY