c. 2000 Religion News Service

(Eugene Kennedy, a longtime observer of the Roman Catholic Church, is professor emeritus of psychology at Loyola University in Chicago. His new book, “The Unhealed Wound: The Church and Human Sexuality,” will be published by St. Martin’s Press in the spring.)

(UNDATED) America awakens after the election as a man does after falling down the stairs. He hurts all over but he is still alive, although he rises shakily and is unsure of what has happened to him and why.

The country’s spirit has been tested in a way that was unpredicted by the prophets of politics, mismeasured by the exit poll accountants and misreported by the television news anchor.

How can we understand an event that puzzles these outriders on whom we depend to tell us, first, what will happen to us, then that it happened to us, and, finally, why it happened to us?

That scores of lawyers were dispatched to the Florida recount as if to an accident scene only underscores the feeling that something happened beyond our control, something beyond the vocabulary of our ordinary media traffic controllers, too.

That, however, has always been the nature of spiritual crises. It is not that they hide themselves as much as that we have lost our capacity to recognize and identify them and so they surprise us by their impact on us. That occurs in a culture in which, for example, everything is interpreted to us in the lexicon of economic causes and effects.

We are told of the wisdom of market forces, that the market itself speaks, and that, if we listen to it, its cost/benefit vocabulary explains all human activity, including sex and love. If the culture’s confusion about the latter subjects is any indication, then we should be wary of economic explanations.

What occurred in Election 2000 is far better understood, as, indeed, are our confusion about sex and love, as a spiritual experience _ one whose energies are psychological and whose determinants are moral.

This election may one day be understood as the true legacy of a period in which the country’s psyche was infected by a public ethic that reduced all behavior and decisions to a common denominator below sea level. We were persuaded not to examine our motivation too seriously by assurances that, as we were forewarned, it is the economy, stupid, and, as long as the good times roll, and the god Greenspan keeps inflation under control, we can survive lying, manipulation and the decay of moral standards.

That brings us to President Clinton whose legacy we may identify at last. Nothing could reflect his personality more accurately _ or better illustrate the powerful influence of character on our nation _ than the agonized and agonizing division that emerged, as an unsuspected but true image does in a developing photograph, in American life on election night.

Perhaps the president has had goals so high in public service that they camouflaged the low means he settled for in setting the tone not only for his administration but for the mood of the country during the prosperous 1990s.

Yet, everywhere one looks around this man whose great gifts make him a tragic figure, one finds scalding and dangerous divisions. The nation has been so affected by his personality that the latter, of itself, so splits electors that many vote, not for the men running but on their liking or disliking for him.

The lives and worlds of many people close to him have also been split. Think of those in prison, those forced to resign, those betrayed by his pledge he never had sexual relations with a White House intern.

We need only think of the rancorous seasons visited on the nation by his behavior. He has stood divided before us, as faithfulness is from infidelity and honor from disgrace, so that we have had a split-screen passage that induced stress fractures in the nation.

These were ignored because, in the language of economics, we were told to write it off, to take the good of prosperity and pay the price of the tolerable bad of a divided and degraded sense of morality.

President Clinton’s legacy may be found in the division of the nation that bloomed from seeds long ago scattered by public relations offensives designed to scorch the earth and squelch the truth at any cost, by a fouled atmosphere in which sex and love were, in fact, roughly separated from each other on a national stage.

The evident division in America is no accident and, since it was caused by a public relations approach to honor and honesty, it cannot be treated by further applications of that strategy.

Sadly for us and the president, his legacy of divide and conquer in public and private life is now the spiritual crisis in America’s public and private life. The next president must attend to this before anything else.

DEA END KENNEDY