c. 2005 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) Terri Schiavo is our spring moon, silent and pale, fragile but not barren, circling us as we circle around her bedside. Her eyes hold us even when we want to lower our heads and look away.

Do they disturb us because they are glossily vacant, or do they arrest us like a light bobbing on the dark and distant sea, sending a signal so unmistakably human that it breaks free of the entrapping television screen?

Terri does not allow us to change the subject even though many others are trying to do that very thing. A federal judge reduced the matter of continuing her feeding to the legal question of granting “injunctive relief” while lawyers define the matter in terms of the conflicting rights of decision-making between parents and spouses. And it is certainly easier to talk about our own need for living wills, to change the subject to the one we are really interested in: ourselves.

At the center of this noisy dispute we find the classic American impulse for pragmatic solutions built on certainty, on solving the problem in can-do fashion so that we can shake Terri’s image out of our heads, reach closure and move on.

Perhaps we cannot look away from Terri’s eyes because in their depths we glimpse a truth that makes us uneasy, that _ as St. John of the Cross wrote on the Mount of Perfection _ there is no way here, no certainty possible for us here either. We cannot finish this in time to watch Leno or Letterman and get a good night’s sleep.

Terri speaks silently of the intrinsic uncertainty of the human condition, a notion that we resist even though it permeates every layer of this situation that overflows with so much sorrow. It is, after all, as much or more about the hazards of human love than about the conflict of legal rights. Hasn’t everyone drunk from this cup of unexpected estrangement that is passed at one time or another around every family circle?

We cannot break away from Terri’s eyes because their depths reflect the mystery of being human, the mystery that by its very nature cannot be solved but can only be entered and lived. The boundless mystery of existence is the common ground of both religion and science.

In her classic study of medical students, sociologist Renee Fox discovered that as they advanced in their training they became less, not more, certain about events that they once presumed they could document without ambiguity. They might note an hour on a chart, but are incapable of scientific certitude about the exact moment of a patient’s death.

These students had encountered the same kind of uncertainty in science that Yale psychologist Paul Bloom recently described in The New York Times about the moment when we become human: The qualities we are most interested in from a moral standpoint _ consciousness and the capacity to experience pain _ result from brain processes that emerge gradually. In other words, there is no moment at which a soulless body becomes an ensouled one, and so scientific research cannot provide objective answers to the questions that matter most to us.

Terri Schiavo has become a slim silver moon, reflecting the light of eternity onto the plains of time. That is why we cannot easily look away from her eyes. We have come upon a mystery _ THE mystery _ that defies anybody’s claim to solve it quickly or certainly.

Terri’s eyes tell us something about this “mysterium tremendum et fascinans,” this overwhelming and gripping mystery that tells us that our lives are never measured with certainty or judged with finality.

We cannot look away from this woman’s eyes for we find our own image reflected in them, the mystery we share with her and with each other, the great spiritual mystery expressed by Joseph Campbell to all religious insight: Tat Tuam Asi _ This is you.

KRE/JL END KENNEDY

(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.)