13-09-2009, 12:26 PM
On a cloudless, cool November afternoon in the late 1990s, George Michael Evica led JFK Lancer conference attendees in a brief service of remembrance at the Kennedy Memorial in Dallas.
At the conclusion of his remarks, George Michael asked us to place our hands on the cenotaph's central black marble slab -- a gesture of love and respect and solidarity.
And something else.
Late into the previous evening, he and I had spoken at length of a terrible possibility: that John Kennedy's remains had been deposited beneath that slab by the conspirators in a gesture of hate and contempt and eternal enmity.
We had no solid evidence that such a sacrilege was committed. But we understood the assassination to have been as much a spiritual as a political act.
To deny to JFK eternal rest in hallowed earth would be, for the assassins of his spirit, to complete the exorcism of his spirit from their realities.
But just as they miscalculated the enduring power of their victim's earthly legacy, so too they failed to understand that, by definition, the resting place of John Kennedy's mortal remains is hallowed.
Cenotaph: from Greek kenotaphion: kenos, empty + taphos, tomb.
Empty tomb.
Or not.
At the conclusion of his remarks, George Michael asked us to place our hands on the cenotaph's central black marble slab -- a gesture of love and respect and solidarity.
And something else.
Late into the previous evening, he and I had spoken at length of a terrible possibility: that John Kennedy's remains had been deposited beneath that slab by the conspirators in a gesture of hate and contempt and eternal enmity.
We had no solid evidence that such a sacrilege was committed. But we understood the assassination to have been as much a spiritual as a political act.
To deny to JFK eternal rest in hallowed earth would be, for the assassins of his spirit, to complete the exorcism of his spirit from their realities.
But just as they miscalculated the enduring power of their victim's earthly legacy, so too they failed to understand that, by definition, the resting place of John Kennedy's mortal remains is hallowed.
Cenotaph: from Greek kenotaphion: kenos, empty + taphos, tomb.
Empty tomb.
Or not.