COMMENTARY: Girl, Interrupted; Old People, Dancing

c. 2000 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 _ A recent movie, “Girl, Interrupted,” is set in 1967. The director, according to The New […]

c. 2000 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 _ A recent movie, “Girl, Interrupted,” is set in 1967. The director, according to The New Yorker, tells the story of a “depressed and `promiscuous’ upper-middle-class Boston girl” in an effort to “provide a fresh perspective to the sixties.”


The arresting title, “Girl, Interrupted,” unfurled in my imagination like a Flag, Burning. That was a common sight in the antiwar protests during those conflicted times.

Then there was City, Smoldering, as in Detroit in 1967, in searing riots that made a charred shell out of once great neighborhoods, prophesying the smoke that would rise over several American cities the next year, 1968. That was the aching season of Leaders, Murdered, as Martin Luther King Jr., and Robert F. Kennedy died along with something of the nation’s spirit.

This film is about a borderline personality, whose symptoms include sudden dramatic mood changes and a tendency to “split” people, so that those who suffer from it sow divisions all around themselves. There may be no better symbol for that time of wrenching divisions, between generations and between races, between men and women, too, in that estranging time in which the invented solution for racism was mandatory busing that set people even more against each other. The ’60s might well be termed America, Interrupted.

Perhaps more of our lives than we care to recall are summed up in such terse phrases, in Application, Denied, as it deliberately was for many minorities seeking mortgages to buy better homes for their families. They were redlined, ruled out of certain parts of cities in an effort to protect the cities from white flight.

It was also found, in a specialized Roman Catholic religious matter, in Petition, Denied. Vatican officials stamped that on the papers of many priests seeking dispensations to marry unless they submitted to the bureaucratic condition that they confess that they suffered from a mental illness or they had never felt a calling in the first place.

Then there was Divorce, Granted, often preceded or followed by Hearts, Broken, in a period in which many people encountered great pain in the never ending American search for true love.

Thinking back on all that sadness makes one affirm the teaching of Original Sin. For sadness is a form of energy and, like all energy, it can never be destroyed. It can be transformed by love or time, or a combination of them, but there is no plastic surgery of the spirit that will remove all its traces.


My reflections on this melancholy theme were in fact transformed by going on a pilgrimage. It was not to Lourdes, or Medjugorje, to which so many bring their sorrows. I did not even know I was making a pilgrimage until I reached its surprising location.

It was in a room in which members of what Tom Brokaw calls “The Greatest Generation” _ the World War II cohort _ were having a party. A small band was playing the Big Band background music of their lives. There I had an everyday vision.

Old People, Dancing: It was a remarkable sight, husbands and wives who had borne God only knew what over the long years they had been together _ illness, disappointments, the death of children, a thousand tender secrets shared by these men and women who had kept faith with each other.

They moved so easily into each other’s arms, into places of comfort and trust that had long ago become second nature to them. Their heads came together, their cheeks touched, their eyes lighted up, many of them began to sing the words of the songs together. A mood as sweet, it seemed to me, as that of any biblical wedding feast, filled the air.

Then the miracle happened. As I watched them, these people broke free of time, walked clear of it, shedding years and gray hair, becoming again the young man and woman they still saw in each other.

They had saved the best wine of life until last. This was intimacy of the rarest vintage, the closeness that cannot be hurried, bought or faked that stuns younger people who wonder how these older people achieved it.


For a moment, the surroundings blurred or morphed away. These Old People, Dancing were really Faithful People, Loving. They could loosen the grip of time because they had found something eternal together.

The music stopped, of course, and the little miracle dissolved as, yielding up their youth for age again, they exchanged one last glance before they walked off the floor together. Blessed are these couples dancing for they revealed the meaning of love and fidelity to anyone fortunate enough to see them.

DEA END KENNEDY

Donate to Support Independent Journalism!

Donate Now!