c. 2005 Religion News Service
(UNDATED) Stopping by the woods on a snowy and silent evening, poet Robert Frost suddenly saw right down to the bottom of the mystery of life. He tells us that the only sound came from his horse who “gave his harness bell a shake to see if there was some mistake.”
I saw part way into that same mystery this week; it was not on a snowy evening but on a blistering summer morning outside a nondescript motel. It was the type of place where the only sounds rose like a howl off the nearby interstate.
A group of elderly travelers was assembled at the side of a tour bus as their driver heaved their luggage into its compartment. They waited in that undemanding and orderly way of the retired who, having survived such great public terrors as World War II, betrayed none of the restlessness characteristic of so many crowds.
Because there was so little that they had not seen or felt over the years, they were not worn out by the waiting that is such a big part of the mystery of existence. They will be just as patient on Judgment Day.
Except that this, as I soon learned, was its own kind of Judgment Day as the quiet crowd embarked on a pilgrimage to the quiet meadow in the Pennsylvania hills where Flight 93 crashed on Sept. 11, 2001.
These ordinary people were making their way to a place that is not advertised on billboards. You have to ask at the motel desk to get directions to find it: “That’s right, you turn at that gas station down the hill. …”
They were traveling unheralded to a place that is unheralded now because of the landslide of post-Sept. 11 events. Like the arguments about how much commercial space should be built at Ground Zero in New York, these events have almost obscured this open field made sacred by the deaths of the brave men and women who wrested control away from the terrorists who wanted to crash the plane in Washington, D.C.
These classic American midsummer travelers were turning the dawn into Judgment Day by seeking Shankhill, Pa., rather than Orlando, Fla., or Hollywood in California as their destination. They signaled that in this still place you could hear the sounds of everything of importance to humans _ love, honor and sacrifice.
What did these people bring with them to this site in the rolling hills? There were some flowers and messages, of course, but it was mostly that simple human gift of understanding sorrow so deep that nobody can name it.
These men and women were like old soldiers who place their campaign ribbons and medals on the graves of their comrades, not only to honor them but to drain off or lessen the grief that still stirs above their resting places.
These visitors brought the ribbons and medals earned in their own lives. They lay these invisible mementoes of a full life in this meadow that overflows with the simple mystery of being human, and the tenderness and love that finally conquer all the hurt and loss that go with it. They were gently judging themselves, the dead, and us, with these gifts that are as simple as those the Quakers sing about.
Poet Alice Duer Miller wrote during World War II of seeing English people plain “waiting to pay their tax standing in the rain.” Under the battered canopy of that motel on that hot morning, climbing on their bus to visit that place of mystery, you could see Americans plain as well.
KRE/JL END KENNEDY
(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.)
