c. 1998 Religion News Service
(Eugene Kennedy, a longtime observer of the Roman Catholic Church, is professor emeritus of psychology at Chicago’s Loyola University and the author of”My Brother Joseph,”published by St. Martin Press.)
UNDATED _ We find ourselves this religious season stranded east of Eden and wondering if we can find our way to Bethlehem before the kings get there. We have cast aside our road maps while _ envy for us and blessing for them _ they keep their eyes fixed on a guiding star.
America has been Eden for a long while. What a place, this new world! Everybody working, low inflation, good times rolling; people from all over the world lined up to get in, take the oath to the flag and cut themselves a piece of the pie of plenty.
That pie used to be apple and, of course, made by mother. America the bountiful once called forth leaders as plain and pure as its harvests. One of America’s charms, recognized throughout the world and not entirely hidden from us, was a kind of plainspoken innocence _ Abraham Lincoln played by Gary Cooper and painted by Norman Rockwell.
This year many of us wonder if we have lost that innocence for good. For we have re-enacted Genesis with the nation’s fields of abundance standing in for the Garden of Eden. This year we have eaten together from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, diminishing our spirits and our spirituality.
The sin at center stage of our remake of Genesis was, of course, not particularly original and, no, it wasn’t sex. In the Bible, the longing to be as gods enticed Adam and Eve. We, on the other hand, want the gods to be like us, no better, no worse, wearing equalizing name tags, unable to judge us so that we have nobody, human or divine, to answer to anymore.
Hi, my name is Adam and I’ll be your first parent this evening.
Who could have imagined that a biblical curse could inhabit our inventiveness as the streak does the column of marble? Yet hundreds of television stations, the spaceless Internet, and weightless e-mail have become the elements in a new Tower of Babel.
How could we have missed that the Information Age is but another name for the sum of the Knowledge of Good and Evil? Eat of this fruit and you will be convinced that you have the right to know everything about everybody at any time.
We are being consumed by the delicacy we sought to consume. And now we have all grown sick from eating the fruit, sick of what we have learned, and sick, in a sense, of ourselves and the utter subjectivity by which we have made ourselves the core and measure of all things.
Sadly, Cain slays Abel every day in what, for many, is an increasingly hostile battle of the sexes. Classes and support groups exist for those who see marriage as competition for power rather than a collaboration of love.
How unhappy, these uncounted people, who, locked within themselves, suffer terrible pains in the friendships that fail and the love that remains just beyond their reach. How touching the recent pair of New York Times stories documenting the search, by heterosexuals and homosexuals alike, for at least a friend and maybe a romance.
Young men and women have started helping out in soup kitchens, the setting that has surpassed museums as places to meet Mr. or Ms. Right. And gays,anxious to meet a friend not out for anonymous sex, subject themselves at special clubs to computer indexing to pump out match-ups.
Loneliness is this decade’s mark of Cain worn like headphones on the lonely long-distance runners jogging all about us. They are figures in the post-modern apocalypse that has arrived not with flame and sword but with the death of healthy innocence and a diet of cynicism.
Can we ever be innocent again, or hand on innocence to others, after a sordid year of low doings in high places in which not only truth but falsehood itself was also corrupted?
From the landfill of impeachment testimony, we extract one poignant but largely overlooked tale that, small as it is, suggests that hope is breathing hard but is not dead.
Monica Lewinsky tells of the conflicted president’s struggle to be good, to avoid the behavior that betrayed him, and of the calendar he kept to mark the days on which he conquered temptation and really was good.
How suddenly more like us the president seems in this battle, for we all understand this small drama. This is the most human and moral anecdote in the whole sorry narrative. Like the seed saved from the hurricane that will rebuild the forest, this story carries a recognition of sin, contrition and a desire to be better.
Alone, of everything we have heard, this familiar, sometimes failing, sometimes succeeding effort in the spiritual battle, holds the promise that all of us, including the president, may yet restore something of our innocence again.
IR END KENNEDY
