c. 2005 Religion News Service
(UNDATED) Which is more poignant, the reported emptiness of Michael Jackson’s Neverland existence or the loneliness of Johnny Carson’s life? Both men rose to wealth, power and fame by meeting the severe conditions imposed by America’s entertainment culture, which turns out to be _ theologians take note _ Purgatory itself.
And who would have expected that the antidote to the well-publicized emptiness of these men would come from a previously unknown, ordinary couple honored on the occasion of the president’s State of the Union address?
Even Dante would not have suspected that the long red carpet on which celebrities tread into award shows leads directly into Purgatory West, a space that is actually brightly lighted and has central heating and air conditioning. As in many a house you could name, the surroundings are fine, it’s the residents that, with only reruns of themselves on television to watch, are limping in place in unfinished lives _ not totally unhappy but not happy, either _ waiting to be cast in a sequel, with a better script, in which things will turn out better for them.
Both Jackson and Carson started serving time there in this life. That umbrella bobbing above Jackson’s head does not shield him from the sun but from exposure to the half-light of his own makeover. He is the nation’s quintessential Purgatory figure, the middle-aged man who ends up with the most toys but few, if any, deep relationships with ordinary people.
Described as Johnny Carson’s “longtime sidekick” _ and how would you like that in your obituary? _ Ed McMahon says it is appropriate that the late comedian had no funeral because Carson believed that you did your thing, “put on your hat, and went out the door.” Yes, Johnny liked to sail, he played cards, but he really wasn’t close to anyone.
Without funeral rites, America does not know how to grieve for Mr. Carson and, without clear clues, does not know what to make of Mr. Jackson. But it knows that it received a blessing from out of the whirlwind of the Iraq War, from Bill and Janet Norwood whose Marine sergeant son was killed at Fallujah.
As guests at the State of the Union address, they rose before our eyes like a two-paned Pieta, a sorrowing mother and father bearing their dead son, making forever sacred at least one moment of late-night television, filling to overflowing a medium that runs on empty most of the day.
This was reality on television rather than reality TV. The latter entertains us with trifling mysteries of who will survive in artificial circumstances. Reality on television _ Janet Norwood holding her dead son’s dog tags and Bill Norwood tenderly holding her _ reveals the mystery of life that is found in plain suffering.
Who would have guessed that Bill and Janet Norwood, who would blend into any checkout line in America, would take us with them into the deepest mystery of life _ how love makes us inseparable while exposing us to the everyday risk of hurting and being hurt by life and by each other?
No doubt people will kindly remember and God will exempt from the real Purgatory entertainers who shared with us their clever gift of joking and singing to kill time. But Janet and Bill Norwood share with us their human gift of love and suffering that break open the eternal.
MO/RB RNS END
(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.)
