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) We come to the third anniversary of Sept. 11 with many explanations of how the jet daggers slashed across America’s last innocent morning. In classic American fashion, we believe our experts _ theorists, protesters, politicians, and not-quite-A-list celebrities _ who say blaming some agency or some person will put the mystery to rest.

They are convinced that this mystery can and must be solved to achieve such other classic American goals as finding closure, putting it behind us, and moving on.

But the more we learn, the more Sept. 11 emerges as a different kind of mystery, a meta-mystery beyond human solution and for which there is no closure and from which there is no moving on.

Sept. 11 is a mystery the way exploding stars on the rim of our galaxy are mysteries. So deep are they in space that their fragments and fountains of flame are reaching us only now across a span of light-years beyond counting. We gaze today at telescopic images of violent eruptions that began unfolding long ago in a sphere that seems outside of time.

The glare of Sept. 11 is still reaching us, rolling slowly through us, breaking hearts as it reveals its mystery as beyond solution and beyond the cheap grace of easy healing through the “counseling” that we read about after all tragedies too deep for tears. How American, we note, to wish to cast out sorrow swiftly and efficiently as if it were a devil possessing us instead of as an ordinary daily companion and as filled with secrets as the man sitting next to us on the bus.

Sept. 11 opens to us the mystery of suffering, loss and hurt, that may scar over but twinges and throbs and sometimes bursts open like sunrise at the sound of familiar music or a loved one’s name. Such suffering has a succession of half-lives that means that it never completely disappears.

So we say of somebody, “He never got over that,” or “She carries a great sorrow within her.” We all know somebody who died of heartbreak. In such observations, we track the mystery of the successive generations of sorrow that are found in everybody who ever loves truly or risks greatly.

The generative nature of sorrow is attested to in the fresh sadness that has seeped out of Sept. 11 to break the marriages of many of the firemen who distinguished themselves that day and in the long sad weeks of seeking for the bodies of their lost companions. More than a few have broken the hearts of their own wives and children by marrying the already broken-hearted widow of a fireman who died on Sept. 11, as The New York Times Magazine reported back in May.

“It is hard to account,” the writer tells us, limning the mystery, “for how much any of these families’ life changes stem from grief and how much from change all around them: a new rush of ceremonies … social functions, sudden influxes of money … job shifts … to fill empty slots.”

But, the story concludes, “Depending on whom you ask, Sept. 11 is an all-encompassing explanation for any emotional disruptions or an all-too-facile excuse.”

In short, this is the mystery of suffering at work, fermenting fresh sadness as if it defies solution. How can anyone otherwise explain the sadness too tender to touch in the story of the surviving firefighter who takes the children of a dead firefighter to Little League while his own are without a father to take them.

Sept. 11 involves all of us in the mystery of Life-As-It-Is that can be entered but never conquered, claimed or mapped successfully. It is the mystery in which we all dwell, a religious mystery that goes unnoticed and unnamed, even by religious leaders who speak piously but never mystically.

Sept. 11 is a holy day for ordinary men and women who understand what defines us as human. It is not that we are agents of sin, for which there is absolution, but that we are bearers of sorrow, for which there is no closure. DEA/JL END KENNEDY