c. 2004 Religion News Service

(Eugene Cullen Kennedy, a longtime observer of the Roman Catholic Church, is professor emeritus of psychology at Loyola University in Chicago and author of “Cardinal Bernardin’s Stations of the Cross,” published by St. Martin’s Press.)

(UNDATED) Norman Mailer once observed of a political convention whose atmosphere was heavy with “do-gooder” overtones that there was “insufficient evil in the room.” Nobody will ever say that about sorrow.

There is no cartel holding back the supply, waiting for a higher price, because the supply always exceeds the demand. And despite contemporary theorists who believe that everything, including sex and marriage, can be reduced to economic exchanges, nobody barters or borrows sorrow.

There is no bidding on sorrow for sorrow is a cost itself, a toll that we pay every day for being human, for feeling sunset’s glow and hearing love’s old sweet song. In the Age of the Embedded in military units and political campaigns, sorrow remains the Great Embedded. The latter word means “fixed firmly in the surrounding mass,” and just so is sorrow inlaid in being alive.

But, as it is said of the wind and of the spirit, who has ever seen sorrow? Does it exist in a pure state or do we see it as we see the whirlwind, a dervish hidden in a cone of debris? We have also known the wind by its touch, gentle one day and fierce the next.

We see sorrow every day in the effects of wars and rumors of wars, of disasters and illness, but sorrow waits in the wings of good times as well as bad and never misses its entrance. It does not set off the security alarms nor can it be sensed by the dogs who nose among the baggage of all of us pilgrims of everyday sorrow, of the disappointments and setbacks we keep to ourselves. Do you have anything to declare? No, we reply, we’ve been doing that all our lives.

How many sorrows go unnamed and uncounted, lost in the shadow of the great tragedies and losses of the day? Look at the people on the bus, in the airplane. What do we know of what they bear unhealed inside them? The death of spouses or of children, bad news from the boss, or worse news from the doctor, or something as common and poignant as a child growing up and leaving home, and no biblical river in which they can wash themselves clean of it at the end of the day. “Write sorrow,” Shakespeare tells us in “Richard II,” “on the bosom of the earth.”

How can it be that Jesus, described as a man of sorrows, preached on the Mount that “blessed are the sorrowing, they shall be consoled”? (Matt.5,4)

Where is this consolation for those who lament with Jeremiah, “Behold and see if there be any sorrow like unto my sorrow.”

Jesus is not a man of sorrows but a man of our sorrows. He is not as concerned about the sin we all commit as the sorrow we all bear. For that was he born, for that did he come into the world.

That is why he forgave sinners as easily as he talked and ate with them. By becoming human, he took on our two-sided but deepest knowledge, of both love and sorrow. His mission was to the sorrowing, heartbroken lovers, parents who have lost children, to the woman scorned by the hypocritical crowd, to those denied sight and hearing, to the hungry crowds and the lost sheep, to the special sorrow of the separations that go with growing old or growing up, and the question he asks of his own mother _ a question we have all asked or been asked _ Did you not know that I must be about my father’s business?

Blessed are the sorrowing for they know that they are alive, that they have loved and been loved, that they have taken risks with their great gift to share it with others, or that they have felt life on behalf of others, as artists do, or have forgotten themselves in giving life to others, as parents, doctors, firemen, teachers, maiden aunts and unknown soldiers do.

At church, permit yourself a distraction that is really a prayer. Watch the couple who bring up the gifts of bread and wine for the celebration of the Eucharist. Young, old, or somewhere in the vague reaches in between, they are really bearing all our sorrows _ the stuff of our Eucharist _ to the altar on our behalf.

DEA END KENNEDY