c. 1999 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’s Press.)

UNDATED _ Death is often spoken of as darkness. Its wings are not shadowed, however, but brilliant with a light in which we can see ourselves and others more clearly.

So the death of John F. Kennedy Jr., along with his wife and her sister, gave America a hard look at itself. A great, widely shared loss leads to a finding about the living.

We may read the obituaries to learn about the deceased, but the revelation is about ourselves and the depth of our spirituality and the quality of our character. In short, people run true to form.

The commentators during the days of coverage of the death and burial of Kennedy, his wife and his sister-in-law revealed their lack of knowledge about Roman Catholicism, its teachings and its rituals. They also displayed as much uneasiness with religion in general as with these deaths in particular. Faith was flyover country, as the Washington pundits describe America between the coasts, for almost every talking head on television.

And these are the people who shape the news and mold opinion on major issues of human values all the time. The long week when death hovered over sea and sky suggests that they are either spiritually impoverished or just too embarrassed to speak comfortably about the relationship between faith and the issues of life and death.

We were not surprised, for example, to hear television reporter Connie Chung ask renowned evangelist Billy Graham,”Do you think that John Kennedy Jr. is in heaven with his mother and father now?”Remember that this is the same preacher who, a year ago, was shrugging off President Clinton’s sexual relationship with Monica Lewinsky as a kind of”boys will be lusty”escapade.

Maybe he wasn’t expecting the question about heaven, but you could not have made up his answer:”That is something that I, too, can’t foresee.” Other commentators revealed how baby boomers have such a difficult time talking about a story in which they themselves are not featured. Thus, historian Douglas Brinkley said, retiring the award for self-reference, that”With his … handsome countenance … he was my generation’s photogenic redeemer.” Dan Rather choked up; Barbara Walters fantasized like a movie fan about whether JFK Jr. might have run for the presidency, as did many other analysts. Historian Michael Beschloss opined that”… if he won, it would be a restoration of the Kennedy era.” We listened to the commentators and, except for some like Mike Barnicle and some priest guests, they were uncomfortable as if, by saying too much, they might be signing on to the religious right or a vast right-wing conspiracy to unite church and state.

What was most striking was the spiritual depths that were revealed in the decisions by the Kennedy and Bessette families to keep their grief to themselves, to shield the liturgies for their loved ones from the media, and to bury them in the sea that took them.

How difficult that last judgment must have been but out of what profound spiritual depths it came, as plaintive as Rachel’s weeping, to speak without words to the depths of all of us. So this action, hidden mercifully from our eyes, reverberates still within us and, because it embraced the mystery of random death with the mystery of life lived fully, it will whisper within us forever, as all true spiritual experiences do.

And, beneath the voices of the commentators, John F. Kennedy Jr. revealed himself to us as well. In everything he said and did, he made it clear that he felt no call to the political life, that backing a satirical magazine, George, was a statement about the limits of his participation, a step removed and a world away from its hurly-burly. Over and over, he claimed that he wanted an ordinary life, that he was searching for it, that he understood that he was not fully grown up yet. That is why he wore his baseball cap backwards, why he glided down Fifth Avenue on his in-line skates to his mother’s deathbed five years ago. Give me some space to myself in which to mature, he implored newspaper editors. Don’t you get it, I’m just a kid …

To know that hard truth about himself was to know more than many observers, complacent in their media power, know about themselves or the real human values that lie, apparently hidden from their eyes, in every story they report.

AMB END KENNEDY