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 _ Now that President Clinton has been cleared of impeachment charges, we are being washed, not in the healing waters of biblical streams, but in the debris-laden flood of explanation. The people didn’t want it, we are told; they believe he lied and obstructed justice but they want the good times to keep rolling.

Have you seen anybody nodding in assent, the way they do when a speaker has hit the core of their experience? Have you, whatever your political affiliation, responded this way to the rationalizations of the so-called Senate trial?

As Joseph Campbell has written, whenever there is a great public event, such as the slaying of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., there are abundant superficial explanations of what took place. Based on the complexity of circumstance, these are never exhausted, lend themselves to conspiracy theorists, and do not deliver a sense that the depth of the event has been plumbed or truly explained.

What, Campbell asks, is the secret reason for King’s death? The surface reasons _ those debated to this day in the halls of paranoia _ include the two men’s presence in Memphis on the same April night in 1968; James Earl Ray’s seedy hotel room’s view of the motel balcony on which King stood; the rifle he used; and the way he escaped until he was arrested in England two months later.

The secret reason for King’s martyred destiny is found, of course, in his life dedicated to raising the moral consciousness of the country about its racial problems. This crusade, rooted in his religious convictions, led him to his execution in Memphis as surely as Jesus’ preaching led him to his death in Jerusalem.

The popular explanations, found in many textbooks, often strip King of his religious calling as a Baptist minister and transform him into a secular political leader. They miss the secret reason, that richest and most tragic of all explanations, that to be a true spiritual leader _ to confront your own generation with hard sayings _ is to sentence yourself to death.

The secret reason for Clinton’s acquittal is also spiritual. It is deeper than poll responses but it explains their puzzling consistency. The secret reason that so many so instinctively wanted to keep the president in office hails back to the nightmare years from which we have never recovered. We recall the grainy film of the 16-year-old Bill Clinton shaking President Kennedy’s hand in the Camelot days when the world seemed briefly young again. And we recall that placid Dallas midday when the young president’s head exploded from a rifle shot, exploding the times themselves around him. The young prince was slain in the streets and authority and the country have never been the same.

No wonder we are always saying, as it is now echoed, that the”time for healing”must begin. We have never healed and every contemporary call for it is an unconscious cry to close the wounds inflicted on the nation, its institutions, and our souls on that November day. No wonder we cannot believe that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. He seems so puny to have inflicted this great wound, as fresh now as ever, on the nation.

And that is the secret reason that we would not, indeed, could not remove a young president from office. We could not, in our common unconscious as a people, sustain the trauma of killing the president in public again. Another grainy film, the Zapruder pictures, haunts us and connects the events.

This young president’s acquittal is related to that young president’s death and the still unhealed, still largely untended spiritual damage it inflicted on all of us.

We made an effort to heal that wound by refusing, as our secret reason, to kill the man who, despite anything and everything else, symbolizes the authority of the nation. That profound spiritual unease at what might happen if we killed the king is the secret reason, unknown even to the senators, for the votes, as balanced at 50-50 as our terror, to acquit the president.

DEA END KENNEDY