COMMENTARY: Sept. 11 Continues to Cast Long, Sacramental Shadow

c. 2005 Religion News Service (UNDATED) Grief arises at dawn as big and blinding as the sun itself. So it did on the recent morning when New York City’s medical examiner’s office announced that it “had exhausted all possible means of identifying human remains” from the Sept. 11 destruction of the Trade Towers. This news […]

c. 2005 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) Grief arises at dawn as big and blinding as the sun itself. So it did on the recent morning when New York City’s medical examiner’s office announced that it “had exhausted all possible means of identifying human remains” from the Sept. 11 destruction of the Trade Towers.

This news story, published by The New York Times, was more revelation of mystery than reportage of fact. The message to the families of the 1,161 victims that remain unidentified is also addressed to everyone who has ever loved or wept for a loss, reminding us of how invested with the eternal are the flesh and bone of the persons we cherish in time.


Other recent news events intrigue us briefly and disappear without a trace. They were well symbolized by the sluglike television trucks with divining-rod antennae feeding off two events in that Valhalla of the ephemeral, California _ the Academy Awards and the Michael Jackson trial. These vehicle herds record America’s one-night stands with celebrity that it can barely remember in the morning, much less a month later.

Sept. 11 rises above these news events as great actors do above the awards because it remains the great sacramental event of our age whose mystery makes time holy even as it transcends it. In the heartbreak of its stricken families we recognize our own so that we can see in each other’s faces that we are all indeed within six degrees of separation.

The announcement dashed Kathy Bowden’s hopes that “some part, any part, of her brother, Thomas H. Bowden, Jr., might be included in a burial. … Her family will probably go ahead with a burial this spring with only some personal effects and some dust from ground zero.”

Matthew T. Sellitto wondered whether he would now get another phone call. The New York Times reported that after city officials had “informed the family three times that they had pieces of his son, Matthew C. Sellitto, he asked them not to call again until all the forensic work was completed. “`We knew the day was coming eventually, but it’s still bittersweet,’ he said.”

And Meena Jerath stroked the razorlike double edge of loss when she spoke of Prem Nath Jerath: “I am very sad and hurt that the identification process has ended without finding any trace of my husband. … On the other side, part of me is relieved that no tiny fragment was found. … If only a small piece were found, I would wonder what happened to the rest of him. What were his last moments like? Did he suffer a lot?”

All the heartache of all of time is found in these stories about people whose names may never appear in the newspapers again. They are Lenten acolytes bearing the invisible but searing mark of the ashes that they long only to bury tenderly, knowing that they contain the wholeness of the persons they loved so much. “These fragments,” T.S. Eliot wrote, “I have shored against my ruins.”

This is our mystery because there is no explanation for why it engulfs us except that if we are blessed with love that is eternal we must accept the losses, great and small, that come through experiencing it in time. A thousand small losses shower down on us in fragments, seeping into our days like time-released aspirins.


The mystery is that lovers live at such close range that they can hurt each other easily, thoughtlessly, forgetfully, without ever meaning to do so. Lovers grow closer together by collecting, mourning and burying these little fragments all the time.

Sept. 11 was not a triumph for terrorists but for these lovers who reveal the depths of the mystery of ordinary living in their simple yearning to touch again those taken up in the twinkling of an eye on that day. We read again in a different light (John 6) the instruction of Jesus after he broke the loaves to feed the people: “Gather up the fragments that remain that nothing be lost.”

(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.)

MO/PH RNS END

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