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 _ Just writing the date 2000 makes us thrill to the newness of the times.

While we speculate about what waits for us in the future, however, we might also meditate on what waits in the past for every one of us, every day.

Indeed, numerous flares touched off in what we call the past are just now bursting over our heads to throw light on us and our lives.

Some of those flares were launched, of course, from the Titanic, whose story we have still not fully understood or absorbed. Its illumination comes not from movie special effects but from its passengers who remain so alive to, and so like, us: people packed for the future, each with loves and longings like our own, each whispering something to us as if death had never fully claimed them.

Their mystery is, of course, our mystery, and it only deepens as we inspect their possessions, for they tell us how homely and human our things may seem to those who look at them a hundred years from now. How touching small possessions remain, how outside the grasp of time as they speak of affection and industry, of the rounds of daily life and relationships that remain now as they were then, true inventories of human hearts and souls.

So, too, the great British mountaineer George Mallory was waiting for us in the past, lying in the snow and ice half a mile from the peak of Mount Everest, preserved so that his discoverers could see the bruises that he might have sustained when he slipped to his death. His goggles were found along with the simple contents of his pockets, not so different from yours and mine. How like us this English gentleman is, speaking to us now across three-quarters of a century, and how much his mystery parallels our own.

No expert can tell us if he died as he descended from conquering the peak or whether he lost his life just short of that goal. Even the team of explorers who found his body was driven away by the gales on that tallest steeple of Earth. Does heroic effort survive history’s passage? Does it still tingle in the air around interrupted lives like Mallory’s, so that we might be the discoverers of his eternal spirit as surely as the guides were of his earthly body?

So, too, waiting for us in the past, was an American town that had been abandoned for a great project that had for years submerged it in the waters of a man-made lake. As the astringent of climate slowly began to shrink the lake, the markers of that town began to emerge, each level with a new revelation about the places that existed and the deeds that had been done, each one a jolt to the memory of the living. The town and, in a sense, their past lives, with their sins and glories, had been waiting in the past for them.

So, too, in the last spring of the century in Berlin, the bunker of Nazi Propaganda Chief Josef Goebbels lay waiting in the past. Like dozens of other bunkers from the Hitler period, it spoke of horrors that cannot be buried beneath a rebuilding city. As Alan Cowell wrote of it in The New York Times,”even as (Germany) craves a future in which it can come to terms with its modern history, it is undermined by its past.” What of what we have done and may have forgotten waits, like the ridges of the old town or the bunkers of Hitler’s Berlin, within us ready to give testimony about us? Perhaps the greatest surprise that most people will have is that they will not be reminded of the bad things they did they want to forget but of all the good things they did that they cannot remember.

The past even surprised that specialist of the past, the Vatican, when restoration of the facade of St. Peter’s Basilica revealed the extraordinary colors that had been used by the original artists.

Is this an accident and no more? Or did this message wait in the past, as sacramental signs do, pulsing with an ever fresh message for those of us trapped in time?

Let those who want the Roman Catholic Church to return to the past be prepared to discover that the past, far from being over-controlled, sings of freedom in brightly hued surprises that speak timelessly of its sympathy and support for, as well as its delight in, everything truly human.

DEA END KENNEDY