COMMENTARY: Schiavo Agony and Death Presents a Mythical, Spiritual Moment

c. 2005 Religion News Service (UNDATED) The media coverage of Terri Schiavo’s long dying placed her on a vast public stage. Did the competing choruses from left and right help or undermine our understanding of what was really happening before our eyes? Beneath this turmoil _ and beneath that wreaked by tsunamis, wars and everyday […]

c. 2005 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) The media coverage of Terri Schiavo’s long dying placed her on a vast public stage. Did the competing choruses from left and right help or undermine our understanding of what was really happening before our eyes?

Beneath this turmoil _ and beneath that wreaked by tsunamis, wars and everyday heartbreak _ we experienced what the late mythologist Joseph Campbell termed a mythical moment, a revelation of the “wonder and monstrosity” of our existence. This spiritual insight cuts through the paper-thin surface of sound and color so that we may enter the depths that are barred to the army of easy pundits, self-righteous crusaders and self-confident preachers that daily laid siege to the Florida hospice in which mystery was being disclosed.


It is no accident that we speak of these observers and commentators as “covering” the story. Such coverage is like that of draping a sheet over Michelangelo’s David so that it cannot speak directly to us.

Few events speak as deeply to our death-denying and rite-deprived nation as this one. This was a mythical moment that is not a re-enactment but a real experience of what Campbell described as the “descent and return of the maiden.” Terri is our maiden, bringing death back into the world, confronting us far more with our own mortality than with our living wills or any other illusion of controlling our human destiny.

We may be strongly for the right to life but we must still accept death. We may advocate the right to die but we cannot easily alter its engagement book or domesticate its mystery.

The daily gatherings of advocates in Pinellas Park, Fla., strongly resembled those on the other side of the earth where people carry out the rites associated with the descent and return of the maiden. Campbell tells us that the “rites are performed to the tireless chant of many voices, the boom … the whirring … rising from the earth. The ceremonies continue for many nights, uniting the villagers into … a living spirit _ lifted out of temporality and translated into the no-place, no-time, no-when, no-where of the mythological age, which is here and now.”

The crowds outside Terri’s hospice did not just try to keep her alive. Perhaps unknowingly, they tried to fashion rites that break free of time to symbolize our mortal passage and our eternal destiny. Like all mythical moments that confront us with the monstrosity and wonder of life _ such as the assassination of John F. Kennedy in the last century or the destruction of the Twin Towers in this one _ the wild disorder of time rages around their eternal nucleus.

We actually feel the pull of time in these events. It is the source of the restlessness in the background crowds and causes television cameras to swerve, go out of focus, or find reporters staring blankly and missing their cues, or recording some expert’s solemn estimation of how many hours Terri had to live. These are the smudged fingerprints that time leaves on the eternal.

Beneath all this the mythic moment remains unmistakable. We can see America’s yearning for what its culture has misplaced or misjudged. The media may be understandably obsessed with the latest news tidbit, but that makes it difficult to find either the words or the space for the eternal that is found in every human passage.


How can you report on Terri as the maiden whose descent bears death back into the world that wanted either to postpone or conquer it altogether? The human need for rites that express the “monstrosity and wonder” of the mystery of existence was only faintly recognizable in the efforts of the crowds outside the hospice to find the true center of their own demonstrations.

Terri Schiavo was the true center of this mythical moment. Many have claimed to speak for her, but, if we listened, we could hear her speaking out of her silence, the maiden bringing death back to the world that does not want to accept it, the woman who was not the subject of a fleeting story we read in time but the author of a mythical moment by which we enter the eternal.

MO/RB RNS END

(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.)

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