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) Perhaps the world adorns itself with the superficial things of time _ the Emmy Awards, box office receipts, Brittany marries again _ to distract it from the deep within it, vast and rich as the sea, whose currents are eternal.

Our lives are an interplay between our consciousness of, and constraint by, time and our awareness of, and longing for, the eternal. We experience both every day but they are often so intermingled that we cannot, or do not, identify those moments when we get a glimpse of, or ride on, the urge of the eternal in the quotidian.

The liturgy of worship is designed to open us to the eternal rather than to punch our time cards of religious duty. That is why it has always used the native tongue of the eternal _ music, art, and metaphor _ to tap into the mystery beyond reason.

Those without a sense of art’s capacity to escape time imagine religion as driven by the clocks as much as commerce is. That is why the medieval Church got into trouble selling Indulgences as so many years or months off from punishments that have nothing to do with time.

The time-bound also picture God as an old man and visualize Saint Peter as a gray-bearded bureaucrat checking a ledger at the very gates of eternity. Goodness cannot be measured in units of time. It is where we meet the eternal in others, it is what allows us to be friends, fall in love, or transcend ourselves. It cannot be time stamped or bar coded.

Time and eternity are in a constant pas de deux in our experience. It was not, therefore, an accident, or just the calculation of a programmer who long ago made friends with the mammon of iniquity, that NBC-TV showed “Titanic” on the last Sunday before the beginning of autumn. Time-harried executives, unaware of why they were doing it, responded to movements in the deep within themselves when they picked a film about the mystery of loss, love and memory that are of the essence of autumn itself.

We are not surprised to learn that, on the deck of the dying Titanic, the brave musicians did not play “Nearer My God to Thee” but an English piece called “Autumn.” They felt the tug of mystery that we all experience in the deep within us when the earth tips halfway back from the sun to spread shadows across our busy lives as surely as it does across the infield of World Series games.

We keep time but eternity keeps us, and, although the fall, as it is also mysteriously but rightly called, is when the year seems to begin in school openings, new seasons in the arts, and getting back to work again, its mood is that of things coming to term, of leaves turning and harvests taken, of the passage of time, all time and our time, too.

Fall comes from the Germanic fallen, evoking, with an unsentimental and teutonic finality, the leaves not just coming to rest but completing their destiny, and some cycle we all feel in our deep, by falling to the earth.

It is fitting that the liturgy encompassing this season is called ordinary time, that plain and homely prairie relieved here and there by holy days even as our ordinary lives are by baptisms, weddings and birthdays, so that we breathe in and out with the universe whose groans of longing were written of by Saint Paul. What he really heard was us _ our sighing and longing on behalf of the galaxies for the eternal. That is what Saint Paul knew “in part, in a glass darkly,” and we do, too.

So the very small mystery of NBC’s selecting “Titanic” for the eve of autumn is really a sliver of our mystery, the mystery that we experience in the cycle of every day, of every journey and of every year. Listen to and draw up freely from the deep, the well of eternity within all of us.

MO/JL END