c. 2005 Religion News Service
(UNDATED) Sadness settled on Chippewa Falls, Wis., after a bus carrying the high school band crashed into a jackknifed trailer truck on Sunday (Oct. 16), killing five, including the band leader. Does the music of sorrow rise from the wreckage of that crash like the blues above New Orleans, and will people now hear it in every high wind that blows across that place?
Beneath the ’60s lament “Where have all the flowers gone?” is a question as old as humankind, “Where does all our sorrow go?”
Some educators apparently think that sadness can be dealt with in pragmatic American fashion. They announce after every school-related tragedy that “counselors” will be available to the students in shock from the incident.
Is sorrow something that can be processed promptly like a toxic spill in a neighborhood? Just send in the therapeutic cleanup crew to wash down the sidewalks, sound the all-clear and tell everybody to carry on as if nothing had happened.
This is like treating life as if it were an illness to be cured rather than experienced by us just as it is and just as we are. There may be a pill for heartburn that allows you to eat spicy foods without a violent reaction. There is none, however, for heartbreak that allows us to digest it as if nothing had happened to us.
Most Americans know that sorrow cannot be sent easily into exile, that the seemingly cheap grace of “achieving closure” is expensive and never really works. As actor Paul Newman once told an interviewer who asked him about his grief over his long dead son, “It changes but it doesn’t go away.”
Sorrow and time are kindred elements. That explains why we are always asking where time goes when it is not hanging heavy on our hands. Time gets us coming and going and is always just beyond our reach and like sorrow cannot be grasped for control or closure. Sorrow feasts on time and on the changes it works in us and in everyone around us.
A month ago I went to church in Garden City, N.Y., one of the communities that lost scores of its citizens _ people just like you and me _ in the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11.
Services had been held in that sanctuary for dozens of them. Sorrow had risen like incense from the mourners as it does in every house of worship in the world. Looking up, I realized that their sorrow had not disappeared but had gathered in the ceilings and domes, invading tiny pores and dulling bright colors, leaving them with a sheer and sacred scar of all the human suffering that has been borne below them.
Church roofs are hard to maintain not because of what the weather does to them from the outside but because of the pain residue they absorb from those kneeling beneath them.
A few years ago, the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel was cleansed of what the restorers regarded as immemorial grime. Their actions revealed the brilliant colors that Michelangelo had used centuries before. Many observers, accustomed to the dusky near-monochrome of recent decades, were startled, thinking the brightness had been purchased at the loss of the mystery.
What had been removed was the patina of time, the laminate of suffering that had been wafted up from the men and women who had stared as tourists at the masterpiece. As pilgrims, they had left, with sighs and prayers, the signature of their own human longings on its surface.
The Sistine Chapel ceiling holds a panoramic painting of the mystery of creation in which we all share. The real work of religion is not to give us all the answers or to tell us how to vote but to symbolize, even in stained ceilings, this mystery beyond all words that stretches from Chippewa Falls to New Orleans, from Pakistan to Iraq, all across the world.
MO/RB END RNS
(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.)
