c. 1998 Religion News Service

(Eugene Kennedy, a longtime observer of the Roman Catholic Church, is professor emeritus of psychology at Loyola University in Chicago and author most recently of”My Brother Joseph,”published by St. Martin Press.)

UNDATED _ The popular PBS program, The Antiques Roadshow, without intending it, delivers more spiritual insight each week than a Sunday morning filled with televised hellfire preachers warning us about the Last Judgment.

Far from bidding us to discover a new and vacuous spirituality in the New Age, the show turns us to the riches of the past, to our history, to the truth of what we claim as our own and who we are.

Like the program, the Last Judgment will provide a simple experience in one of the most common of scriptural settings, a crowd of average people.

Blessed are crowds in the Bible for to them the great truths are revealed.

Think, for example, of the crowd on the hillside who waited to hear the words of Jesus and stayed to be nourished, every one of them, from a few loaves and fishes. Think of the cheering crowds on Palm Sunday or the jeering crowds of Good Friday.

The Antiques Show is usually taped in a large convention center, much like the settings preachers summon up for the final public scrutiny of our souls. Long lines of people are seen, each person carrying something out of his or her past to a table at which one of a crew of expert appraisers will disclose what it is worth.

What is of interest, as it is in life itself, is what we can see in the background, the people, undefended and certainly not made up for the camera, just as they are in everyday life. That’s what the crowd will be like when we are judged, a random lot, called, as if for jury duty, on the same day. Blessed are the ordinary for that is the designation that fits most of us.

They wait patiently, expectantly, uncertainly _ much as we will _ for the value of what they bring to be revealed. On many occasions the appraiser examines the object and disappoints the owner. It is a replica, it is one of many, it does not have exceptional value.

The transactions are offered fairly and truly, with a measure of sympathy and no hint of shame or rebuke. The people walk away from these little judgments with a deepened knowledge of themselves and of that which for so long they misunderstood or valued incorrectly about themselves.

Even more revealing to us is the discovery that antiques are more valuable in a battered rather than a refurbished state. Oh, the appraiser says mournfully, if you had only left it as it was. Touch them up, hide their flaws, and their value plummets.

In the same way, we hold up better just as we are, scarred by time and chance, in our original state. Spiritually, we are defined by our deepest truth, by how we have weathered the years that have been granted to us, by what we are like inside rather than on the surface.

The Last Judgment gives us a better view of ourselves. Blessed are those who have insight for they shall see the God who made us as we are, the God who calls us to be ourselves and never to regret our scars or the other signals that we have lived in the midst of time and events instead of in a museum or in an attic.

The surprises of judgment will be pleasant for everybody. As on the show, the judge finds something of great value that the person had never suspected he or she had. We will be astonished to find that God sees the good in us that we cannot or will not see ourselves.

We overhear intimations of the Last Judgment in what people say when the expert tells them that the object they have brought in unretouched condition is worth thousands of dollars. They smile, of course, then add that, nonetheless, they have no plans to sell it. They want to keep it in their family, hand it down to those as yet unborn.

There is a spiritual yearning, proof of a destiny beyond price, and it applies to each of us. For that un-retouched part of ourselves that God sees and by which He saves us, we may say our prayers on this Thanksgiving.

DEA END KENNEDY