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For the moment at least, this tribute shall consist of the Daily Message for July 23, 1999. |
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The site is limited today to a single Daily Message prepared in the spirit of a tribute to John F Kennedy Jr., Carolyn Bessette Kennedy, and Lauren Bessette. This is directed in particular to those who are either younger or of the same generation as JFK Jr. and the Bessette sisters because I would expect your grief is the most intense of all of those who mourn their loss. Those of us who are older have emotional callouses from the losses of President Kennedy, Martin Luther King, and Robert Kennedy, to mention a few, and are better able I would expect to absorb this loss. Similarly, we are most likely better prepared because of a personal loss, or, indeed, personal losses, ... Let me first say that the loss of President Kennedy was unbelievably mind numbing for me, and that the prospect of the loss which has now become a reality brought back those same exact feelings. I simply am better able to cope with them now. Do we not feel these losses so keenly because of a love for those with whom we will no longer share life, is it not a loss of those shared experiences which added so richly to our lives which intensifies the grief? An icon salute comes to mind. For those of you with faith, you know absolutely that in the grander scheme of things, passing in reality should be our objective, for it is our reward, indeed, the ultimate reward. Are we not very imperfect in our faith that we can not celebrate and rejoice on these occasions? It would not surprise me at all if at the moment your faith is challenged. It will not at all surprise me if you of their generation do not receive from them a true gift of love, the deepening of your faith. And that would make the love reciprocal, wouldn't it. And one of my personal losses which forced me to think this through very thoroughly, it was one of the dearest, sweetest persons to have ever walked the surface of this planet, my sister in law. She was spared the tawdriness of life on this planet which we of a lesser God have to bear, at an age significantly less than 30. COPYRIGHT 1999 PonyTail Institute for Change |