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. His new book, “The Unhealed Wound: The Church and Human Sexuality,” will be published by St. Martin’s Press in the spring.)

(UNDATED) The recent disruption in national life, with its dangerous distractions, is really an outsize version of our own lives.

Everybody would be grateful and rest better if they could get things settled in their own experience. Yet that American Dream of finally achieving balance seems ever just beyond our grasp.

That is why we often intone the phrase “As soon as …” Complete it as you will: “the kids move out,” “the mortgage is paid off,” “my pension is vested,” “I hit the lottery.”

Life, like a gentle confessor, listens carefully and asks, “And then what?”

It’s the “Then what?” that gets us.

We anticipate many dates as the Independence Day that will free us of our daily emotional, financial and physical concerns. But when people stop worrying about their kids, they start worrying about their parents. How difficult to get that sense of control of all the contingencies that tantalize us by riding the updrafts, like a paper airplane inscribed with a treasure map, that keep it just beyond our reach.

We have the American Dream to get us through American Reality. That is why golf is popular. Being accepted in the golf club is like passing the Last Judgment and the course is a re-creation of the Garden of Eden on which innocence and youth can be regained. Golf is a religion, televised on Sundays like the Mass for shut-ins. The players say more prayers than they do in church, and the quiet is greater than that of a cathedral.

In short, through golf people deal symbolically with the great inquiry “And then what?” It evokes such theological concepts as “This green is forgiving” and is filled with tomorrows, second chances, favorable drops, and all that might happen if or after.

Golf is appropriate for humans because within it we identify what we recall at Thanksgiving, indeed, what gets us by on the back nine of everyday life.

Golf is a game of moments, of those remarkable times when everything goes right, when we get ourselves together, and, after multiplied disappointments and as many fizzled shots, we finally are completely and truly on game, if only for an instant.

Such moments go a long way for us humans. That’s all golfers talk about after the game: those few melded seconds when they played in an inspired way, when they brought the best in themselves to life. That occasional glimpse of our best possibilities keeps us all going through the long everyday of life when we often see less than the best of ourselves.

Thanksgiving allows us, against the last tawny landscape of autumn, to recall the moments in our own lives, and our relationships, in which we are one with the best that is in us.

Anne Kiley, 87, for 58 years the wife of master landscape artist Dan Kiley, spoke for all of us when she told The New York Times about what sustains love and life together: “Our best times together have been lived in moments. Just as the other evening we sat on the terrace gazing out over the flowers to the mountains. Bathed in the lovely light, we seemed to float free of ourselves, and then it seemed we were like two leaves that drifted and touched together, a moment of homecoming, which can in that instant make up for any separation.”

A moment is an interesting concept because, like momentum, it comes from the Latin word for movement, that is, literally, a point in the movement of time.

Such a moment opens the mystery of time, allowing us to realize what is true and lasting about us and those we love. In moments recollected in the quiet interlude of Thanksgiving, with the world heavy in expectation of winter, we revisit those moments in which we touch and are touched by the eternal in each other.

What keeps us going if not those moments of revelation when we see that, yes, it is true, we do love each other, we have a treasure in our family that cannot be corrupted by either rust or moth, that, despite failures, we are buoyed by such memories of conquering time through love.

When fire strikes or the waters rise, why do we go back for the photographs and picture albums if not because they are records beyond price of the moments with eternity in them that transcend loss and death and separation.

For these moments of love, fidelity and honesty give us momentum that carries us through the unfinished _ indeed, never to be finished _ challenge of the year. For the human and divine gifts of these moments, we give thanks this and every year.

DEA END KENNEDY