c. 2005 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) The waters of the tsunami have washed across all of us and we cannot seem to break the surface of this overwhelming disaster.

What we look on as the waters recede _ the clothing and the toys, the vacation baggage, the shaky visions from home videos _ speak with the power that all mute objects acquire when they have belonged to people just like us. They whisper that these are deaths in our own family and that we are not yet able either to comprehend or to mourn them.

Last week, this column reflected on how the media often cover the externals of supposedly “religious” news _ appointing a gay Episcopal bishop, the sex abuse scandal’s bankrupting Catholic dioceses, the flexed arm of conservative groups in politics _ but cannot so easily perceive and report on the internalized religion that without fanfare binds together and inspires the lives of millions of believers.

But this past week, without explicitly knowing it, they covered internalized faith as they reported on the tsunami disaster. As when a photographer takes a picture of something in the foreground and catches a greater event in the background, the media have included the great background story to the horrific foreground devastation. It is that of religion as it functions when it is integrated into everyday life.

This is not infantile religion, which is not religion at all, but grown-up religion revealed at its unself-conscious best: responding, without the pressures of political correctness or of heavy-footed moralizing, to people in need just-as-they-are in the world just-as-it-is.

The great religions are giving without any questions or qualifications about the race, faith, politics or gender identity of those who have been devastated. Real religion _ quite different from extremist claimants to a religious identity _ sees through the surface characteristics that seem to make us different to the human substrate that makes us all the same.

Nor are the great religions using this terrible event as an example of God’s punishing sinners or as an occasion for seeking converts among those they assist. While properly focusing on the who, what, where, when and why of the tragedy, reporters are doing the same for faith woven into, rather than added onto, everyday life.

The small, cheap sidebar arguments about who gave how much and when reveal that the devil lives not in the details but in the politics that does not know what authentic religion knows _ that you must put your own agenda aside when there is a disaster in the human family.

Unlike politics, internalized religion does not strive to be at the foreground of the photograph. But it is everywhere in the background, focusing, without worrying about itself or the advantage it may gain from the moment, as it responds to the afflicted.

They may not know it, but the media are also reporting on the Last Judgment, the event that shallow religion has turned into a disaster movie in which shame and humiliation shower down on all of us sinners. But in the Gospel accounts of this Last Judgment, there is no mention of sin and God welcomes those who have fed him in the hungry, visited him in prison, ministered to him by clothing the naked.

The saved seem surprised that they have found God’s favor. They cannot remember when they did what merits them eternal life. “When,” they ask, “did we see you hungry and feed you? When did we see you naked and clothe you?’

These saved persons cannot remember the things that they did that so closely parallel the response of religious persons to the present disaster. The spectacularly simple reason for this explains genuine religion. Truly religious people cannot remember the good they do because, in giving themselves unself-consciously to human need, they forget themselves.

The big religious story this week is not about bankrupt dioceses or James Dobson’s threatening political reprisals on senators who don’t vote for pro-life judges. It is a simpler, everyday story about the internalized religion that inspires people to love others, to see them as relatives rather than as strangers, and to focus so much on helping them that they have no time to think about themselves.

(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.)

MO/PH END RNS